Sunday, December 04, 2005

Bosnian Hill May Have Pyramid

Scientist: Bosnian Hill May Have Pyramid - Yahoo! News: "By AIDA CERKEZ-ROBINSON, Associated Press Writer
Sat Dec 3,10:27 PM ET


VISOKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - With eyes trained to recognize pyramids hidden in the hills of El Salvador, Mexico and Peru, Semir Osmanagic has been drawn to the mound overlooking this central Bosnian town.
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'It has all the elements: four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex,' he said, gazing at the hill and wondering what lies beneath.
No pyramids are known in Europe, and there is no evidence any ancient civilization there ever attempted to build one.
But Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist who has spent the last 15 years studying the pyramids of Latin America, suspects there is one here in his Balkan homeland."

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Liars Are Different

The Smirking Chimp: "According to a University of Southern California study conducted by Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang and published in the October issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry, a deceitful personality is due to a brain abnormality. Raine and Yang found that pathological liars have 26 percent more white matter and 14 percent less grey matter in their prefrontal cortex than do normal middling fibbers�most of us.



White matter is the portion of the brain that transmits information. An abundance of this tissue facilitates the quick, complex thinking involved in lying. Grey matter, on the other hand, processes information and mediates inhibitions (moral reasoning). An individual with a deficit of this tissue will not be impressed by the moral implications of a lie."

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Woodward Not Fast Enough for Bushies?

Crooks and Liars: "Was Cheney, Libby and Rove sitting around playing 'Texas Hold Em,' wondering why Bob hadn't spilled his guts on the pages of the Washington Post all this time? Woodward only confirms that the White House was trying to tell every sympathetic reporter in earshot that Valerie Plame was CIA and Joseph Wilson's wife. It doesn't help Scooter's case either even though Bob can't seem to remember much from two years ago. I had the feeling that Bob thought he would be some sort of Gonzo reporter when he released this information, but instead looks like the village idiot."

Thursday, November 17, 2005

ABC News: Prehistoric Lizard Called Historic Link

ABC News: Prehistoric Lizard Called Historic Link: "Prehistoric Lizard Called Historic LinkScientists Call Prehistoric Lizard a Historic Link in the Evolutionary Chain
A model of Dallasaurus turneri sits in front of a mosasaur at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, in Dallas. The prehistoric lizard, in front, is being described as an important link in the evolution of mosasaurs. (AP Photo/L.M. Otero)By MATT CURRY Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
DALLAS Nov 17, 2005 � Amateur fossil hunter Van Turner felt certain he had found something important during his search of earth turned up by bulldozers making way for a new subdivision in Dallas County.
Sixteen years later, scientists finally confirmed that Turner had discovered the first well preserved early mosasaur found in North America a prehistoric lizard that lived 92 million years ago that evolved into what some call the 'T. Rex of the ocean.'
'Science marches slowly, and my biggest fear all along has been that another specimen of the same animal would be found, and it would be described, and I would lose any first claim to it,' said Turner, an Internet technology manager in the Central Texas town of Mason. 'That never happened, and it kind of reassured the rarity of the animal.'"

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

ABC News: Nations Urge U.S. to Cede Internet Control

ABC News: Nations Urge U.S. to Cede Internet Control: "TUNIS, Tunisia Nov 16, 2005 � Despite a late-night agreement averting a global showdown over continued U.S. control of the Internet's addressing system, many delegates to a U.N. technology summit did not believe the Americans emerged victorious.
Representatives of a number of countries remained adamant that U.S. control must be tempered if the Internet is to fully reach its potential. And even traditional allies of Washington considered it to have opened the door to the possibility of more shared governance."

The great fusion experiment

New Scientist Premium- The great fusion experiment - Features: "The great fusion experiment
12 November 2005
Karl Schneider
Magazine issue 2525
It's back, it's hot and it's bigger than ever - will fusion power silence the critics for good, asks New Scientist
SANDWICHED between the brackish waters of Takahoko lake and Obuchi lake in northern Japan lies a stretch of land that could change our planet's future. All our worries about sky-high oil prices and damaging greenhouse gases could fade if the Japanese government decides to make this the home of a project that could lead to almost unlimited amounts of cheap, clean electricity within 50 years.
Scientists had originally earmarked the land at Rokkasho as one of two possible sites for a vast nuclear fusion experiment called ITER. The aim of ITER is to tame the same nuclear fusion process that powers the sun and produce 10 times as much energy as is it takes to run the machine. In June, after years of political wrangling, officials from six governments finally decided to build ITER in southern France. But despite losing out, Rokkasho may yet be home to another project that ..."

Dying beetles go out with a bang

New Scientist Dying beetles go out with a bang - News: "Dying beetles go out with a bang
12 November 2005
From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
More Sex and Cloning Stories
Questions over scientist's human egg source
Dying beetles go out with a bang
Is home test for HIV a good idea?
Anti-HIV gene goes back millennia
Anonymous sperm donor traced on internet
More Stories
Explore: sex
Explore: life
WHEN death looms, saving for the future is no longer important: it's all about the here and now.
It is a mindset that can be summed up by a T-shirt once seen by biologist Ben Sadd of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. 'It said, 'I'm dying of cancer - please have sex with me'.'
Now Sadd and colleagues have found that mealworm beetles, Tenebrio molitor, do a similar thing. If their immune systems are so seriously challenged that the beetles may die, they divert their resources into producing sexual pheromones."

Jurassic Godzilla Found

Jurassic Godzilla Found - news education science magazines technology science news environment magazine subscriptions anthropology ecology environmental issues online magazines archaeology national science foundation science magazine environmental discove: "
The remains of a 13-foot-long, 140-million-year-old marine crocodile were recent excavated from a Patagonian basin. The animal, technically known as Dakossaurus andiniensis, was nicknamed Godzilla by the US-Argentian team that found it for its massive size and frightening predatory capabilities. Contemporary crocodiles had long, slim snouts and tiny teeth for feeding on small fish, but D. andieniensis probably used its massive foot-long jaws and four-inch serrated teeth to bring down large ocean vertebrates. Unlike modern crocs, it had fins instead of legs and spent all its time in the ocean. Researchers say the ferocious behavior indicated by the animal's morphology represents a surprising new branch of the marine crocodile family tree. More from sciencemag.org"

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Rush's Money Making Scheme

Limbaugh Exploits Our Troops
Rush Adopt a Soldier Program Limbaugh: 'Rush Limbaugh's Adopt a Solider Program and Exploitation
Rush Announced his Adopt a Soldier Program But is it Really Generous and Patriotic?

On Friday, Limbaugh announced his 'Adopt a Soldier Program'. This involves soliciting money from listeners to pay for subscriptions to the Limbaugh letter and Rush 24/7 that will be 'given' to the soldiers. Each listener can 'adopt' as many soldiers as they wish who will each get a subscription. The donor pays the discounted price of $49.95 for each soldier.

The description is on Rush's web site here... Adopt a Soldier Program

Clearly this is a tasteless marketing ploy. Rush and Premiere Radio Networks are fattening their coffers by exploiting the generosity of listeners with the use of our military troops as props. There is not one thing stopping Limbaugh and Premiere from simply giving the subscriptions away. Rush 24/7 amounts to accessing content on rushlimbaugh.com. This content is produced and costs Premiere the same no matter how many people are consuming it. The Limbaugh Letter amounts to a handful of printed pages. If Rush and Premiere Radio Networks wished the troops to experience the generous and supportive spirit of the show, they would simply provide this to the troops instead of making it a function of how many Rush listeners are willing to pony up $49.95 per soldier. '

Why not just do what I do-- send a troop an extra $50 per month. They will like that a lot more than crap from this windbag.

And by-the-damn-way-- I'm not adopting him, I am thanking him.
posted by Bob @ 1:10 PM 0 comm"

TiVo losing ground to generics

Study: TiVo losing ground to generics Tech News on ZDNet: "Brandimensions, the market researcher that conducted the study, said that TiVo's standalone set-top box is failing in two areas: its inability to record two shows simultaneously or play back shows in high-definition TV quality."

Say what? Both my TiVo's can record two shows simultaneously. Somebody has missed the technical boat here.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Heaven and Hell

Jesus' General: "Heaven is hotter than Hell I'm not sure how this will play in Kansas:The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, 'Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days.' Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7 x 7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all.The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that.The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300�K), gives H as 798�K (525�C).The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed. However, Revelation 21:8 says 'But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.' A lake of molten brimstone [sulphur] means that its temperature must be at or below its boiling point, 444.6�C.We have, then, that Heaven, at 525�C is hotter than Hell at 445�C."

Monday, November 07, 2005

Sunday, November 06, 2005

New Discovery Disproves Quantum Theory?

http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/11/06/1923218.shtml?tid=232&tid=14
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday November 06, @06:29PM
from the physics-riots-for-1000-alex dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us the Guardian is running a story that has quite a few physicists up in arms. From the article: "Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation." The only problem is Mills' theory is supposed to be impossible when using current rules of quantum mechanics.

Whetstone Chatuge

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Thursday, November 03, 2005

Wednesday, November 02, 2005