Democracy’s Root: Diversity

Thomas L. Friedman
Last Tuesday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican — the first audience ever by the head of the Catholic Church with a Saudi monarch. The Saudi king gave the pope two gifts: a golden sword studded with jewels, and a gold and silver statue depicting a palm tree and a man riding a camel.

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Friedman, India, and Pakistan

Today Thomas L. Friedman tells us that Muslims could use diversity now to become democratic. I posted his piece above.
I had friends in college from India and Pakistan. I was a little confused then, because as Friedman writes, they are basically the same people, but I was to learn then that they just had a war in 1971. Why are they different?
Friedman believes it has to do with diversity. Pakistanis have a problem with that as we can see with the current Musharraf's shenanigans.

Musharraf Gives Date for Elections

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said Sunday that Pakistan will stick to its January schedule for parliamentary elections but he set no time limit on emergency rule, raising grave doubts about whether the crucial vote can be free and fair.

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Musharraf commits to early January elections

Pakistan's president stops short of lifting the country's state of emergency. Former Prime Minister Bhutto calls the election announcement a 'positive step.'

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Spaniards Back King For Telling Chavez to Shut Up

MADRID (Reuters) - Even Spaniards normally critical of the royal family backed King Juan Carlos on Sunday for telling Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to shut up, but some voiced concerns the monarchy was getting too involved in politics.

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Castro Criticizes Socialist Latin American Leaders

HAVANA (Reuters) - Convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro openly criticized Latin America's socialist-leaning presidents for the first time on Sunday.

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The Coup at Home

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney ...

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Quantum Gravity

This is the Holy Grail of Theoretical Physics. Without experimental guidance it has been difficult to find out the right theory. Recently there are two reports that make me think that some progress lies around the corner.

Photons produced at the same time in the same place got to Earth a few minutes apart due to energy differences

Black holes produced at the LHC in Switzerland next year will mainly decay in known particles

The second observation explains why gravity is so weak, and consequently why the repulsive negative energy of the Universe is so little. The first observation can be understood, introducing a smallest size in the Universe, the Planck size.

In any case the Quantum Gravity conundrum goes to the very essence of existence. Not only why are we here, but also, and maybe more importantly, How does the Universe behave?

Oil Rises on Persistent Supply Concerns

SINGAPORE (AP) -- Oil prices rose Friday to regain ground lost in the previous session, as persistent supply concerns and a late rebound in U.S. stocks offset worries about U.S. economic growth.

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Wide worries over oil prices

The price of crude oil is poised to cross the $100-a-barrel threshold, raising the prospect that the burden on consumers and businesses could be the final straw to tip the US economy into a recession.

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Dutch, British Coasts Braced For Storm, Flooding

HEADLAND NEAR ROZENBURG, Netherlands (Reuters) - The Netherlands and Britain, facing the worst flood threat in decades, closed surge barriers and evacuated people from homes on Friday as a North Sea storm threatened to inundate low-lying areas.

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Benazir Bhutto

This courageous woman risks her life for her country. She is a leader, and other government representatives around the World must learn from her principled stand.

I hope that she survives this confrontation with jihadists and their enablers.

Bhutto Placed Under Arrest as Crackdown in Pakistan Grows

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Friday, Nov. 9 — The opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was placed under house arrest this morning, her political party said. Streets were filled with police officers carrying batons and shields, and trucks blocked roads, trying to prevent access to a protest rally that Ms. Bhutto had helped organize in Rawalpindi, ...

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Pakistani Opposition Leader Bhutto Under HOUSE ARREST

Pakistan's main opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been placed under house arrest, according to Government officials.The house arrest comes just hours before the former prime minister Ms Bhutto was due to lead a mass rally.

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Pakistani Police Cordon Off Bhutto Home

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani police cordoned off the home of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on Friday and sealed off a park in Rawalpindi where she was due to hold her first rally since President Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency rule.

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Benazir Bhutto under house arrest

PAKISTAN'S former premier Benazir Bhutto has been placed under house arrest, hours before she was due to lead a rally against a state of emergency, government officials said.

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California Sues EPA Over Global Warming

SACRAMENTO (AP) -- California and 14 other states are demanding urgent action on global warming from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, arguing in a lawsuit filed Thursday that the environmental and health risks are mounting every day that the Bush administration delays action.

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Blanco's success no flight of fancy

The so-called Beckham Rule has a Spanish accent in Chicago.

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Musharraf Says He’ll Give Up Uniform and Hold Elections

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 8 — Gen. Pervez Musharraf told his national security council today that parliamentary elections would be held before Feb. 15 and that he would give up his military uniform before taking the oath of office for his new term as president.

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U.S. Prods Musharraf to End Emergency Rule

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 7 — Amid a deepening crisis in Pakistan, Bush administration officials have begun pushing Gen. Pervez Musharraf on several fronts to reverse his state of emergency, quietly making contact with other senior army generals and backing Pakistan’s opposition leader as she carries out back-channel negotiations with the general.

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Bill to Oulaw ‘Voter Caging’ Introduced in U.S. Senate

In 2004 for BBC TV the Palast team broke the story of voter caging by the Republican Party now in 2007 a Democratic congress is getting to doing something about it, led by caging victim Senator John Kerry. Read about it here ripped from our friends over at BradBlog.

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Crude Awakening

On January 9, 2004, Royal Dutch/Shell, one of the world's largest publicly traded oil companies, shocked the international financial community by announcing that it had overstated its oil and gas reserves by 20 percent, representing the equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of petroleum--worth an estimated $136 billion

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As Floods Ebb in South, Mexico Tends to Displaced

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, Nov. 5 — Residents of the state of Tabasco woke up Monday to find that the swollen rivers that had flooded much of the state had begun to subside. But there were plentiful signs that the worst may not be over.

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Musharraf’s Martial Plan

By BENAZIR BHUTTOPublished: November 7, 2007Islamabad, PakistanNOV. 3, 2007, will be remembered as the blackest day in the history of Pakistan. Let us be perfectly clear: Pakistan is a military dictatorship. Last Saturday, Gen. Pervez Musharraf removed all pretense of a transition to democracy by conducting what was in effect yet another ...

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Fears Over Aftermath of Mexico Floods

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, Nov. 6 — Additional teams of medical workers and police officers from other parts of Mexico flew into the state of Tabasco today as authorities raised concerns about escalating health problems and looting after the five days of heavy rains last week that put much of the low-lying state under water.

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Beyond the Age of Petroleum

With a inordinate reliance upon petroleum, what are we to do when the well runs dry?

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Mudslide Buries Houses In Flooded Mexico

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico (Reuters) - A huge wall of mud and water engulfed a remote village in flood-ravaged southern Mexico on Monday and the government said at least 16 people were missing.

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In Mexico, Residents Contend With a Flooded City

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, Nov. 4 — Williams García paddled a kayak Sunday over the waters that covered much of Villahermosa, the flooded capital of the state of Tabasco, searching for news of his family.

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{Flood victims reel in Mexico's Tabasco state} {With 1 million displaced...

With about 1 million people displaced, some call out to loved ones on TV, and tens of thousands flee the area.

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Musharraf Declares Emergency Rule

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sunday, Nov. 4 — The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency on Saturday night, suspending the country’s Constitution, firing the chief justice of the Supreme Court and filling the streets of the capital with police officers.

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Mexico Flooding Traps Thousands

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 3 — Tens of thousands of residents in the Mexican state of Tabasco were still trapped in their houses on Saturday by floods that have put much of the state under water in what President Felipe Calderón called one of the worst natural disasters in recent history.

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Where Will the People from Tabasco Go?

Over one million people were affected by the last intense rains in the Mexican state of Tabasco. Do you remember New Orleans? This is several times bigger.

Some of the students from New Orleans ended up in Texas, and some as far North as Illinois.

Is this any different?

There are a few differences, Tabasqueños do not speak English that well, they are not American citizens, and usually do not consider Minute Men Country a safe haven. They may even have nightmares about white devils in Ku Klux Klan white robes with nooses, a la Jena High School.

But there are plenty of similarities, they are poor, in need, and without a home.

I predict that Americans are going to get used to the nice accent of Mexicans from that part of the country.

Floodwaters devastate Mexico's Tabasco state

Hundreds of thousands flee their homes, though not all shelters are dry. President Felipe Calderon promises aid.By Maria Antonieta Uribe and Sam Enriquez, Los Angeles Times Staff WritersNovember 3, 2007

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Dennis Kucinich

This presidential candidate lost last time. He always fights, now he wants to impeach Cheney. Read all about it in his Web Page.

Impeach Cheney

Mexico floods leave thousands homeless

About 70% of Tabasco state is covered in water as the government scrambles to rescue trapped residents. Experts predict another storm soon.By Sam Enriquez, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer1:54 PM PDT, November 2, 2007

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Floodwaters Devastate Mexican State of Tabasco

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 2 — Navy helicopters plucked people from roofs today as rising floodwaters covered much of the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, putting the state capital, Villahermosa, underwater.

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Chevron Earnings Fall Over 25 Percent

Filed at 2:24 p.m. ETReutersNEW YORK (Reuters) - Chevron Corp's third-quarter earnings fell more than 25 percent, missing analyst estimates on sharply lower profits from gasoline production.

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Common Sense

Thomas Paine wrote a nice monograph with this title. He introduced concepts during his lifetime that were not widely accepted at that time, like human rights, and other ideas of that nature.
Nevertheless as time passed his ideas turned out to be widely recognized, albeit not practiced. All humans have the right not to be killed, as that great man, Joe Strummer, would sing in the eighties.

Now I want to use this title for the following thoughts.

More people in the Middle East

Less Oil coming from there

Coming Crisis

Worrisome...

James Kunstler

This skeptical man has a Web page at:

Kunstler

He has a prediction for 2007 in that page.

You can read it here.

It's official: Peak oil is here and "the long emergency" has begun

When historians glance back at 2007 through the haze of their coal-fired stoves, they will mark this year as the onset of the Long Emergency – or whatever they choose to call the unraveling of industrial economies and the complex systems that constituted them. And if they retain any sense of humor – which is very likely since, as wise Sam Beckett .

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A Town That Only Has Water 3 Hours a Day in America

Mayor Tony Reames drives up to the community's towering water tank and releases the tank's meager water supply for a period of 3 hours.

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Bill Richardson

I am not a citizen yet, so I cannot vote; but if I am a citizen next year I will vote for Bill Richardson.

He is a little older than me, he was almost born in Mexico City, and I feel he has a more cosmopolitan view of the world than the other candidates.

Lee Iacocca supports him and so do I.

Tasered Florida Student on Palast Report

The student shocked by a taser gun last month at the University of Florida while questioning Senator John Kerry will appear today onpalastmeyer.jpg The Palast Report on Air America Radio.Andrew Meyer will join Greg Palast’s investigative segment on the Air America program “Clout.” Check www.GregPalast.com for listings and AirAmericaRadio.com.

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Invention Of the Year: The iPhone

The thing is hard to type on. It's too slow. It's too big. It doesn't have instant messaging. It's too expensive...or cheap. It doesn't support my work e-mail. It's locked to AT&T. Steve Jobs secretly hates puppies.

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Stop the Insanity: No War With Iran

By Gov. Bill Richardson11/01/07 "ICH" -- -- It is a tragedy that in the midst of one failed war in Iraq, George Bush and Dick Cheney are pushing a second front of failure and gearing up to attack Iran. The "unilateral sanctions" recently imposed will hurt diplomatic progress in the region, and I find it disconcerting that so many Democrats ...

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Lee Iacocca Backs Richardson for 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee Iacocca says Democrat Bill Richardson is his pick for president, citing the New Mexico governor's foreign relations background and energy policy.

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Don't Tase me, bro' student breaks silence

Wed., Oct. 31, 2007In the media frenzy that has surrounded the Tasering of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer during a September John Kerry forum, one voice has been missing from the conversation — Meyer’s. Now that he has been cleared of criminal charges, Meyer, 21, is speaking out for the first time on TODAYshow.com.

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The immortal remains of Henrietta Lacks.

The immortal remains of Henrietta Lacks.

When human body cells are removed and put into a cell culture, they weaken and die quickly, usually within about 50 divisions. Without the rest of the support structure—a heart, blood circulating, a digestive system and so-on—body cells can't survive. Body cells also age, so even if you were to simulate the body's environment in a test tube or petri dish, the cells would eventually perish anyway. The basic mortality of the cells reflect the basic mortality of the organism they comprise, which is why there's no fountain of youth or medicinal procedure that'll give you biological immortality.

There is, however, one human being who is biologically immortal on a technicality, and her name is Henrietta Lacks. In 1951 she showed up at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, complaining of blood spotting in her underwear. Samples were taken of her cervical tissue and sent to a lab for analysis, which came back with a diagnosis of cervical cancer.

The cancer was caused by the Human papillomavirus, which is a sexually transmitted disease. Most variants of this virus are harmless, but some are known to cause cervical cancer, as in Henrietta's case. After her diagnosis and before attempts to treat the disease with radium, another sample from the tumor was sent to George Gey, who was the head of tissue culture research at Hopkins. Gey discovered that the cells from Henrietta's tumor would not only survive and multiply outside of her body, but they didn't age either. These cells were basically immortal.

And they're still alive, even though Henrietta herself died of the cancer on October 4th, 1951. Now, HeLa cells are about as common in biological research as the lab rat and the petri dish, and are still being grown in an unbroken lineage from the cells originally harvested from Mrs. Lacks in 1951. They're used in cancer research because a scientist can perform experiments on them that otherwise couldn't be done on a living human being. They were also used in the development of the Polio vaccine, making Henrietta somewhat of a posthumous hero to millions.

But say you're a scientist looking at HeLa cells under a microscope. They live independently of the body they came from. They reproduce (faster even than other cancerous cells). They consume, excrete, and do everything an independent living organism usually does. A thousand years from now there will still be HeLa cells multiplying and living, even some of the original cells sampled from Mrs. Lacks, even though Henrietta Lacks herself has long since passed away. Is this a new species?

In 1991 the scientific community decided it was, and blessed HeLa cells with its own genus and species: Helacyton gartleri, named by Van Valen & Maiorana.

That would make Helacyton gartleri an example of speciation, which is when a new species is observed developing from another. In this case, the development is from a chordate (homo sapien) to something that's more like an ameoba (a cross-phylum mutation), giving us an animal with a mostly human genotype, but which does not develop into a human-like phenotype. Since this event occurred in nature when the papillomavirus transformed Henrietta's cells, and not in the laboratory, it's a strong piece of evidence supporting Evolution (although not one that suggests you could go from an ameoba to a chordate, which would probably take more than one mutation).

is a deterministic entityD categorized by MedicineD categorized by BiologyD

2004-04-24 22:54:15.480123-04 Best permanent link

Woman's cells survive for 60 years after her death, cures diseases

There is one human being who is biologically immortal on a technicality, and her name is Henrietta Lacks. Cells from Henrietta's tumor would not only survive and multiply outside of her body, but they didn't age either. These cells were basically immortal. And they're still alive, even though Henrietta herself died of the cancer on Oct 4th, 1951

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Pollution warning over US fires

Residents hit by the deadly California wildfires have been warned to beware of extremely hazardous air quality.

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Brandon Carter

This British cosmologist working in France started the modern version of Dirac's big number hypothesis. I find it interesting that Dirac was the son of an Englishman born in Switzerland that worked in England, and Carter is British and working in France. Coincidences, but then again at some level the Anthropic Principle, as it is called now, is all about coincidences. At another level from my perspective as a Mexican working in the United States; England and France are the same thing. Actually now Sarkozy, President of France, seems to be closer to Bush than Brown, Prime Minister of England, is.

Carter's revision of Dirac was going nowhere, until String theorist got lost and could not predict the mass of the electron, so they chose the best next thing, put all fundamental numbers together and make number soup. Maybe this number will come out of it if one just stirs it just right, like a modern day Goldilocks would.

In his recent note I posted below, Carter tells us that one second is the scale of human consciousness, and one can calculate it, by requiring that we move around 10 m/s with a given complexity of our proteins. That tells us our size, and the time it takes for one thought.

So I guess I could say that this is the time in the history of the Universe, and the place where thoughts can be made. Just like many billions of years ago, time was ripe for hydrogen atoms.

Our purpose then is to make as many thoughts as possible.

Glare of Fires Pulls Migrants From Shadows

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 26 — Out of the burning brush, from behind canyon rocks, several immigrants bolted toward a group of firefighters, chased not by the border police but by the onrush of flames from one of the biggest wildfires this week.

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Objective and subjective time in anthropic reasoning

Contribution to Time in Science, Anthropology, Religion, Arts,
ed. A. Nicolaidis, SR21 workshop, Thessaloniki and Athens.
Objective and subjective time in anthropic reasoning.
Brandon Carter
LuTh, Observatoire Paris- Meudon

September, 2007.

Abstract. The original formulation of the (weak) anthropic principle was prompted by a question about objective time at a macroscopic level, namely the age of the universe when “anthropic” observers such as ourselves would be most likely to emerge. Theoretical interpretation of what one observes requires the theory to indicate what is expected, which will commonly depend on where, and particularly when, the observation can be expected to occur. In response to the question of where and when,the original version of the anthropic principle proposed an it a priori probability weighting proportional to the number of “anthropic” observers present. The present discussion takes up the question of the time unit characterising the biological clock controlling our subjective internal time, using a revised alternative to a line of argument due to Press, who postulated that animal size is limited by the brittleness of bone.On the basis of a static support condition depending on the tensile strength of flesh rather than bone, it is reasoned here that our size should be subject to a limit inversely proportional to the surface gravitation field g,which is itself found to be proportional(with a factor given by the 5/2 power of the fine structure constant)to the gravitational coupling constant. This provides an animal size limit that will in all cases be of the order of a thousandth of the maximum mountain height, which will itself be of the order of a thousandth of the planetary radius. The upshot, via the (strong) anthropic principle, is that the need for brains, and therefore planets, that are large in terms of baryon number maybe what explains the weakness of gravity relative to electromagnetism.

You can read this note; here

Some California Fires Brought Under Control; Winds Ease

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 24 —The fierce Santa Ana winds that have driven wildfires across Southern California began to diminish today with the National Weather Service saying it would lift its wind advisory for the Los Angeles area, although wind and fire danger warnings would remain in effect longer for areas to the south.

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Santa Ana Winds, Frequent and Troublesome

By KENNETH CHANGPublished: October 24, 2007Those often furious, sometimes deadly Santa Ana winds, blowing east-to-west across Southern California, are a phenomenon of geography as well as meteorology.

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Rice wants oversight of private guards (yeah right)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday ordered new measures to improve government oversight of private guards who protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, including cultural awareness training for contractors and a board to investigate any future killings.

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Illegal border crossers brave flames, get burned

By Leslie BeresteinUNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITEROctober 24, 2007 * Damaged Tecate luxury spa plans to reopen this weekend The Harris fire along the U.S.-Mexico border is affecting various aspects of immigration in San Diego County, in particular the busy human-smuggling routes surrounding Tecate and Campo.

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While many shy away, some illegal immigrants brave California wildfire...

The Associated PressPublished: October 23, 2007DULZURA, California: One of Southern California's largest wildfires has frightened many illegal immigrants from hiking through a popular corridor to cross from Mexico even as the Border Patrol has withdrawn some agents.

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50 Illegal Immigrants Surrender After Fleeing Fire on Mexican Border

Around 50 illegal immigrants have surrendered to Border Patrol since Sunday to escape the California wildfires.

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Illegal Immigrants Coming Through Border on Fire

Fires and the Border, 12:01 p.m. So far, the areas of Mexico abutting San Diego County have not been hard hit by the wildfires, at least directly — the burnt acreage south of the border measures in the dozens, not the tens of thousands, and the smoke and airborne ash disrupting life in Tecate and Tijuana is coming mainly from fires north ....

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Time 2

Recently I wrote about cycles. Now I continue with this. There was a time when Hydrogen atoms were fashionable, i.e. the conditions of the Universe were such that electrons were trapped by protons in big numbers. Never since then, and very likely ahead of us, is there a time when so many Hydrogen atoms are made.

Some times somewhere, more Hydrogen atoms are made, but these cycles of Hydrogen production are not equally distributed in the total history of the Universe, whatever that means. This cycle is not very regular.

There are more regular cycles in the history of the Universe. Something I will call the persistence cycle seems very robust. Every second most of the objects in the Universe stay. In the beginning one second was a long time, now it is not much. But in both cases at the end of this second most objects that were there before the cycle started, are there when the cycle ends. Right now this cycle is evident to us here on Earth. Look around, objects around you survive the second test. The second test is the following. Look around, concentrate on one object, test if it is still there after one second, the object passes the test if it is still there. In the beginning of the Universe few objects passed this test; the change was very fast in the second cycle.

Persistence of the Universe goes by small steps. The average size of this step may change as the Universe evolves, but right now it is our perception time. We perceive objects in one second or less. In the beginning this was a long time, now is our perception time, and I wonder if in the future it will be almost zero, i.e. too short for our consciousness to register.

Time 1

The previous note with the name Time is here. There are other notes on this subject in this site. Now I add a little more.
As far as I am concerned time appears from nowhere. There is permanence of objects around me, I keep perceiving the objects, but I know it is a different time, even more I feel I cannot stop time. I make more and more connections, I am more aware, my consciousness is increasing; that is time. Time is an emergent component of my experience. I believe that if I stop perceiving, time will continue to come and organize, i.e. set in a cause effect line, events.
Time is as real as energy or information.

Massive evacuations ordered as onslaught of fires spreads

The number of blazes and their wind-whipped ferocity strain the area's firefighting resources to the limit.

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Time and the Maya

My father was born in Guatemala, so I have some Mayan blood.
I am obsessed with time, the Maya were.
Here I start a few notes on this subject.
Newton says: time flows independently of everything else.
Einstein says: time depends on the mass nearby.

What does it mean?

For Newton time is absolute, for Einstein it is relative. None of them tell us what time is made of. Einstein is more precise, because he wrote equations that tell us how matter curves spacetime, and how spacetime moves matter. It is a two way street.

Here is something I thought recently.

Energy and time are intimately linked. When one eliminates time from motion equations one ends up with energy equations. It is not possible to measure time and energy with more than a given precision, because the product of the errors in these measurements is a constant (Werner Heisenberg).

Either time is constantly created or it always exists. Either way this idea is disconcerting.

Finally, time without cycles is difficult to measure. One needs a reference process that last a second say, to measure how many seconds are there in another process.

The Maya were interested in cycles that were multiples of thirteen and twenty.

I do not know why.

Cycles in Time or Linear Time?

We perceive time because there are cycles. Without repetition we will be living in a timeless way.

Imagine that nothing changes, How will you know that time has passed?

Now we go to predictions. Predictions are possible because events repeat. I predict that the Sun will come tomorrow. If there was no change there is never a Sun coming up. No way to predict, no notion of time.

Nevertheless the future is never exactly like the past, I believe we have a combination of linear and cyclic time. Something like lines and circles.

Einstein's General Relativity admits closed time loops. What do they mean?

Network of Friends

Maybe is the software. I am getting more invitations to networks at digg.com. Maybe my time has come, if the network resonates I may be more helpful to my friends.

NYT Editorial Pages

I have put several links in digg,com to the opinion pieces of Rich, Freedman, and Cohen. I find their views professional, and should I say middle of the road. Nevertheless I am surprised that I don't get that many diggs. Maybe nobody is following what I do. Maybe as time passes I will collect a group of friends that will read my posts. Live and learn.

Save the Planet: Vote Smart

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMANPublished: October 21, 2007People often ask: I want to get greener, what should I do? New light bulbs? A hybrid? A solar roof? Well, all of those things are helpful. But actually, the greenest thing you can do is this: Choose the right leaders. It is so much more important to change your leaders than change your light ...

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Suicide Is Not Painless

By FRANK RICHPublished: October 21, 2007IT was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.

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Leaders of Venezuela and Colombia, Ideological Opposites, Are Tightening Ti

Colombia and Venezuela are rapidly moving to strike energy deals, resolve a boundary dispute and increase trade.

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The Marvelous, Mysterious Maya

An illustrated introduction to the history and culture of the most accomplished of Native American civilizations.

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BREAKING: Dodd will FILIBUSTER the FISA Bill if his Hold is Ignored

Senate majority leader Harry Reid plans to disregard Senator Dodd's intention to place a hold on a FISA bill that includes amnesty for telecommunications companies. In this video, Dodd says he will go to the Senate floor and filibuster this bill if necessary. This is Real Leadership!

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High winds hit states from Florida to Oklahoma

Tornadoes and strong winds tore up buildings in two states Thursday, damaging a shopping mall, a day-care center and a church in Florida and killing two people in rural Missouri. Another 30 people were injured in Oklahoma late Wednesday when two tents collapsed at an Oktoberfest festival.

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Draft Gore!

I just watched a video with Greg Palast against the Draft Gore campaign:

Draft Gore

I like both men, I guess this shows the complexity of the issues in front of us. Palast concern is with NAFTA, and for him that trumps the environment. For me is a very close call and I have not made my mind.

Guillermo González and Gliese 581C

I recently asked Prof. González from Iowa State University about Gliese 581C, this is his response.

"Yes, I know about this planet. I think the probability of life on any planets orbiting M dwarfs is very small. M dwarfs provide very poor habitats for life for several reasons, including water freeze-out on the dark side of a synchronously rotating planet, weaker planetary magnetic field resulting from the slower rotation and greater doses of ionizing radiation from host star flares. In addition, terrestrial planets more massive than Earth are less likely to have dry land, since there is less surface relief for more massive planets. And, the planets around Gliese 581, in particular, are probably very water rich since they likely migrated to their present locations (given the presence of a neptune-mass planet in the system)."

Arctic warming threatening caribou, northern wildlife

The Arctic is under increasing stress with warming temperatures changing wildlife habitat and local climate conditions, researchers said Wednesday.The amount of sea ice has fallen below previous record low levels, caribou herds are declining in many areas and permafrost is melting, according to the annual update of the State of the Arctic report.

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Business Cycles

Time is based on persistence. There was a previous cycle of dot-com companies. It ended with a few winners taking all, maybe I can mention Yahoo, Google, but not AOL. I put money on AOL, I couldn't keep it there, but recently AOL announced that their business model will change. Now I do not pay them for my e-mail account.

Now we are entering a second cycle, Web 2.0, I think that the companies that survived are going to do well; I also hope that some new companies grow now.

Marc Andreessen

Andreessen developed MOSAIC at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. That was the first Internet browser that I used at Fermilab in 1994. I got excited about the possibilities of the new technology. When I went back to Mexico I tried to convince a few friends to start on-line businesses, but failed. As it turned out most of the Mexican telephone business, including Internet, went to Carlos Slim by the power of monopoly.

As the note below states Marc Andreessen is still in the business of creating new things. His company, Ning, may have a better success chance, than if I go back to Mexico and try to convince Mr. Slim of the potential of this new medium.

"Second Earth" found--20 lightyears away!

Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky "second Earth" circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

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Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again

Investors, showing symptoms of irrational exuberance, seem to have forgotten the dot-com bust.

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Hurricane Fears Cost Homeowners Coverage

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Oct. 15 — It is 1,200 miles from the coastline where Hurricane Katrina touched land two years ago to the neat colonial-style home here where James Gray, a retired public relations consultant, and his wife, Ann, live. But this summer, Katrina reached them, too, in the form of a cancellation letter from their home-insurance company

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Signs

Yesterday I wrote about tornadoes in Brooklyn. Not since the fifties have there been tornados in that part of the world. Maybe is not a big deal, after all fifty years is nothing compared with climate. But somehow it caught my imagination, there is this man in the center of one of the biggest metropolis in the world, not able to go to his house after two months have passed because of something that very likely he was not expecting.

I imagine myself in the middle of suburbia, maybe with a house underwater and having to take my family to a hotel or something. This is unsettling.

Tornado Hits Brooklyn; Subway Back in Service 1

Two months ago I posted the news of a tornado in Brooklyn in digg.com. You can read that article here.

Now I found out that at least one family has not been able to go back. What is going on?

Waiting to Go Home, 2 Months After a Freakish Tornado (Brooklyn, NYC)

In stark contrast to the bright, sunny morning, the Eshra house on Bay Ridge Avenue was dark and forbidding, the smell of moldy carpet and uneaten food from two nonworking refrigerators permeating the dusty and debris-filled rooms.

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Rocks From Space

It is a widely accepted story now, that a huge object hit Earth sixty five million years ago and killed all dinosaurs. What about the future? One would expect that NASA and other world organizations would be monitoring the sky for the next big one. Today I read in the recent issue of Discover Magazine in the library near my house, that this effort started through the initiative of private citizens like the Shoemakers. I could not stop the thought that this must have been going on at the government agencies but without informing the public.

The reason for my suspicion is an older event. In the seventies X-rays were monitored by both US and Soviet governments to verify that neither country was exploding nuclear bombs. As it happened these instruments had recorded several events, but coming from up in space not from the ground! Therefore the first strong evidences of the existence of black holes were kept away from the general public.

It seems to me that now the issue is the Star Wars program started by Reagan that kept this more important information away from us. We could literally die during this century by the impact of a big object from space.

I hope they give us enough warning to try to save our lives when that happens.

Ron Paul

This doctor from Texas is running for President. He believes in liberty and does not accept welfare money. When patients do not have money he arranges special payment terms, all the way from working for free to all the money a patient will pay.

Al Gore 1614 Diggs!

Maybe I should not underestimate the mainly young and technically inclined community in Digg.com, that I belong to. But somehow their intense interest in video games and libertarian politics sometimes confuses me. In any case right now 1614 diggs is heartening.

Maybe we will finally have a green president in the US. That will be something!

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change....Draft Gore Now!http://draftgore.com/

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German Wins Nobel in Chemistry

A German scientist whose studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces have affected agriculture, manufacturing and environmental science won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today.

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Mario J. Molina

This Mexican-American Chemist from MIT, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry , for his work on the danger of ozone depletion due to chlorofluorocarbons; is participating in a meeting in Germany, to choose a new type of Nobel Prize. You can read about this in the note from the NYT below.

This "green" Peace Prize may go to Al Gore. We will soon find out.

This great politician recently went to the Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico; where I taught for eighteen years.

These are dangerous times, I hope something good comes out of these efforts.

A Climate Meeting Packed With Nobel Winners

POTSDAM, Germany, Oct. 9 — Sixty-two years after the victorious Allied leaders convened in this stately Prussian town to create the post-World War II world, 15 Nobel Prize laureates assembled here this week for another momentous task: saving the world from global warming.

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For Mexicans, Little Surprise Over Madrazo’s Shortcut

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 9 — Having spent his life as a stalwart in the corrupt political machine that ruled Mexico for decades, Roberto Madrazo has never suffered from a reputation for honesty.

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Noam Chomsky Speaks About Human Destiny 1

Before I posted a link to a Chomsky talk. Now I comment on the digg.com link I have below this note.

In both instances Chomsky touches on a very important subject. If nuclear weapons are not controlled, human civilization may end. One could feel that it is impossible, because our species does not want to commit suicide. My worry though, is that it only takes a few ignorant and greedy people to do. It is thinkable that in the search for profits, some agents may not even see the danger they, and us with them, can end up in, if the recent build up of nuclear weapons continues.

US/Indo Nuclear Agreement:Derailing A Deal

This Indo-US agreement richly deserves to be derailed. The threat of nuclear war is extremely serious, and growing, and part of the reason is that the nuclear states - led by the United States - simply refuse to live up to their obligations or are significantly violating them, this latest effort being another step toward disaster.

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Death, Havoc and Heat Mar Chicago Race

CHICAGO, Oct. 7 — As temperatures soared into the upper 80s, hundreds of runners in the Chicago marathon fell ill and at least one died on Sunday, prompting officials here to halt the annual race for the first time in its 30-year history.

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Latino Congreso focuses on voting power

With the election year approaching, activists at the five-day conference in downtown Los Angeles want to make sure new citizens register to vote and cast ballots.

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Chilean Court Orders Arrests of Pinochet’s Kin and Close Allies

SANTIAGO, Chile, Oct. 4 — A Chilean judge on Thursday ordered the arrests of the widow and five children of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and 17 of his closest military and civilian collaborators on charges of misappropriating public funds.

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High Energy Gamma Rays Go Slower Than the Speed of Light?

The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity

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Rice Reins in Blackwater

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday ordered federal agents to ride with Blackwater USA escorts of U.S. diplomatic convoys in Baghdad to tighten oversight after a shooting in which private guards are accused of killing 13 Iraqi civilians.

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Is the Sky Falling?

I saw Medea Benjamin from Code Pink taken out of an Iranian principal presentation. Eventually she was brought back to the meeting, I guess she agreed not to interrupt the presentation. Also today I saw Ted Glick in Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. He is in a hunger strike because environmental deterioration is not been taken seriously. I had a student in High School that felt the scientific worldview I was presenting was in contradiction with the religious one he preferred. Is the sky falling?

My student turned out to be very civil, he followed my instructions, learned physics, and got an A. Is Medea Benjamin going to agree with Dr. Muwafaq al-Rubaie? So far, as I watch him talking in C-Span, she is listening attentively. Will I join Mr. Glick in his hunger strike? I am not planning to, but I take the Medea Benjamins of the world, seriously, this is a time of change.