Ergo Proxy

this is simply one of the best Sci-Fi show/movie ever. yes better then star wars or star trek
"Everything about Ergo Proxy is rich and impressive, from the gorgeous music, tight writing and purposeful
episode-end cliffhangers to the sophistication of its futuristic society..." Tasha Robinson - SciFi.com

The Immortal Lily The Pink

The Immortal Lily The Pink
The 100th anniversary of the FDA marks a milestone in medicine before which cranks and charlatans ran amok
Lydia Pinkham, as she appeared on an original antique advertising card, circa 1880.

This year has represented a little-remarked-upon major milestone in American medicine: the 100th anniversary of active Federal regulation of food and drugs. The Pure Food and Drug Act came into effect on January 1st, 1907 — the first step toward the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and a step forward from the dangerous anarchy of the patent medicine era.

For the first time, drug manufacturers were required by law to disclose the dosage and purity of their products (including, for the first time, disclosing whether they contained poison, alcohol, or narcotics such as heroin or cocaine). They were also required to refrain from deliberately lying about their products, and from fraudulently substituting a claimed ingredient for some other ingredient.

Bizarrely, such laws were needed.
To celebrate this anniversary, and in time for the holidays, we’re pleased to share a brand new, free MP3 recording of a song with roots extending back to the bad old days of unrestrained snake oil: “Lily the Pink” (performed here by the Canadian bluegrass trio Dirty Dishes).

“Lily the Pink” (which evolved from “The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham”) is a comic send-up of the woman called “the queen of patent medicine.” Starting in 1875, Lydia Pinkham built a business empire on the hype-driven sales of a herbal concoction marketed to women for relief of “all those Painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population.” In specific, it was intended to address menstrual cramps, and was also “particularly adapted to the Change of Life.”

True to the dizzy style of the unregulated patent medicine era, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was promoted with a blizzard of unlikely claims. (As the lyrics of “Lily the Pink” mockingly put it, “She invented a medicinal compound, efficacious in every case.”) Ad copy insisted that it cured everything from headaches to indigestion to farting, not to mention sleeplessness and depression. (Its primary ingredient was booze, so there was no doubt some evidence to support these latter claims.)

Less believably, Pinkham’s Compound was advertised to “dissolve and expel tumors from the uterus at an early stage of development. The tendency to cancerous humors there is checked very speedily by its use.” It was also, the ads said, remarkably effective: “98 out of every 100 women who take the medicine for the ailments for which it is recommended are benefited by it. This is a most remarkable record of efficiency. We doubt if any other medicine in the world equals it.”

Remarkable indeed.

It’s clear that most of these boasts were made up whole cloth, but was any of it true? I asked quack medicine expert Dr. Harriet Hall, “Was Pinkham’s herbal cocktail at all useful for treating anything?”

“The bottom line,” Hall told me, “is that we have no idea whether her product was effective or safe, since it has never been properly tested. We have no good evidence that any of the individual components are safe or effective, and we have no way of knowing what might happen when you mix them. Mixing remedies could do almost anything — they could cancel each other out, have additive effects, vastly increase the chance of side effects, who knows?”

Certainly the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company had no idea whether its product was safe or effective. It was literally something Pinkham brewed up in her basement, without scientific testing of any kind.

On the other hand, we do now have firm evidence regarding the efficacy of black cohosh, the herb modern alternative medicine proponents most often cite as the effective active component to Pinkham’s Compound. Long considered promising as a treatment for the symptoms of menopause, black cohosh unfortunately bombed in a recent large trial designed by the National Institutes of Health to clarify the ambiguous existing literature and settle the question. The results of this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial were unequivocal: black cohosh is useless for the control of menopausal hot flashes and night sweats.

As far as science can tell, Lydia’s Compound was worthless in public health terms. By free market standards, however, it was a soaring success story. Pinkham’s booming 19th century enterprise raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The secret, then as now, was marketing. Pinkham spread the message through national print ad campaigns, door-to-door sales, point of purchase postcard giveaways, and many books and pamphlets that alternated recipes or household tips with ads for her product. The company’s aggressive marketing pioneered a formula for selling quack medicine that is still common today:

1. Market directly to women: At the mercy of a male-dominated medical establishment, women were eager to seize control of their own health. Offering them a way to sidestep the then-primitive medical mainstream through the consumption and word-of-mouth promotion of a herbal “alternative” was (and still is) an effective hook for a sales pitch. With its “just us girls” attitude and its “Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills” tagline, the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company turned shameful social inequality into a source of profit.
2. Sow fear of mainstream medicine: “ANY HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE is painful as well as costly and frequently dangerous,” warned Food and Health, a promotional book produced by Pinkham’s company. “Many women have avoided this experience by taking Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound in time…”
3. Present your big business as warm, folksy and personal: With Lydia Pinkham’s matronly portrait as its logo, the company was able to present itself as a homemade cottage enterprise. (Fans of the animated TV series Futurama may recognize “MomCorp” and its subsidiary “Mom’s Friendly Robot Company” as comic descendants of the Pinkham advertising model.) Customers who wrote for advice even received personal responses from Lydia herself — for years after she died. In fact, a large, dedicated department within the company churned out replies by the thousands.

Today, this time-tested advertising model — present your mainstream competitors as cold and mercenary, while presenting your own for-profit company’s herbal products as warm, homemade, and natural — is still in wide use in the alternative medicine industry. Indeed, it’s shocking how little has changed.

Today, herbal concoctions and other supplements are cooked up and marketed with wild abandon, with all the unrestrained, unverified boasting of the patent medicine era still on display. We are told (coyly, skirting the few rules for labeling) that herbs and proprietary blends can cure more-or-less anything — just as we were assured by Lydia Pinkham.

Have we really made so little progress against health fraud?

In fact, we’ve come a long way. Today, most medicines are carefully regulated, and consumers can be reasonably assured of the basics: that effectiveness, side effects and interactions are known to some degree; that the bottle contains what the label says; that we are not unknowingly buying bottles of heroin, and so on. We all know that regulation comes with its own cost (drugs take a long time to get to market, for example) but we’re much, much better off than drug consumers in Pinkham’s day.

Unfortunately, current regulations have a hole in them, a hole large enough to drive a truck through — or rather, truckload after truckload of untested, unregulated herbal “supplements.”

The fault for this lies with a piece of legislation called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which seized back control of patent medicines from the FDA. Driven by strenuous lobbying from supplement manufacturers, this legislation removed all herbs, vitamins, and minerals from FDA oversight — despite the fact that herbs are drugs, exhibiting a full range of effectiveness (or ineffectiveness), dangerous side effects, and interactions with other drugs. Not only are the producers of herbal drugs and other supplements no longer required to prove that their products work — or whether they are safe — but the burden of proof regarding safety is explicitly shifted to the FDA.

That is, anyone can sell any old combination of herbs at any dosage, without any obligation to even try to find out if that product is safe or not.

Only if a supplement kills enough people to get the FDA’s attention, and if the staff of the FDA can find the time and budget, can the FDA then attempt to prove in court that the supplement is unsafe. This costly and lengthy close-the-barn-door-after-the-horses-have-escaped procedure is of course attempted only rarely, and in the most severe cases. The first such case was the banning of ephedra, a supplement suspected in hundreds of deaths. This ban was soon challenged in court (by a company which sells ephedra), and overturned — on the basis that the DSHEA forbids FDA action even in such an extreme case. Luckily, the ruling against the ephedra ban was itself overturned on appeal. After more than two years of legal battles, ephedra supplements are today illegal.

Despite this eventual victory on this one substance, the DSHEA renders the FDA almost powerless over herbal drugs, even if they are known to be dangerous. (Certainly the FDA has no power at all over herbal drugs whose dangers are simply unknown.) This industry-driven legislation inexplicably shifts the cost of safety testing from the companies that profit from the sales of supplements to the taxpayer. More to the point, the risk is shifted from the R&D budgets of companies to the personal health of individual consumers — exactly where we began, in Lydia Pinkham’s day.

Thanks to the DSHEA, the supplement industry has exploded (by several hundred percent or more). It now rakes in tens of billions of dollars a year. Requiring no expensive safety testing or FDA approval, these products are produced with an enviable profit margin, which has of course drawn large pharmaceutical corporations enthusiastically into the supplement industry. (People buying “alternative” herbal products rarely appreciate the likelihood that they are feeding their dollars into the exact same Big Pharma system they are attempting to circumvent, with the only difference being that corporation has been excused from the responsibility or cost of ensuring the safety or effectiveness of one of its lines of drugs.)

We’ve come a long way — but we’ve also, in some ways, come full circle.

This is a shame, because the room for mischief we’ve granted to modern alternative medicine manufacturers is the exact same ground we won at such great cost and effort from the early 20th century patent medicine industry. Like today’s Natural Cures infomercial star (and convicted con-man) Kevin Trudeau, the Pinkham company engaged in a series of running battles with Federal regulators regarding the dishonesty of its labeling and advertising. As is still the case, vagueness and coy insinuation became the best friends of quack medicine manufacturers. (Noting yet another label change in 1939, Time magazine quoted the American Medical Association’s exasperated patent medicine czar: “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound is ‘Recommended as a Vegetable Tonic in Conditions for which this Preparation is Adapted.’ This statement is about as informative as it would be to say that ‘For Those Who Like This Sort of Thing, This is the Sort of Thing That Those People Like.’”)

It’s clear that we still have much work to do in this important public health arena:

In 1875, one business empire was founded on the sale of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, an untested medical potion for “those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population.”

Today, after a century of wrestling with the patent medicine industry, another company markets an alternative medicine concoction promoted as “beneficial in menstrual and menopausal distress.”

It is called Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound.

GTA 4

Now i will have my whole clone army of zombies

A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos.

Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned embryos.

It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable cloned embryos from an adult primate – in this case a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque monkey – and they are scheduled to report their findings later this month.

Homegrown DHS

A Dutch guy seems to have set up a small network of bluetooth scanners. He has all the information logged to a central database and you can search it over the web. On his website it says "Some of these matches were only minutes apart. Therefore I could even calculate the approximate speed of someone moving from one location to another.". There are also some interesting statistics on his site showing traffic volume in his hometown (based on bluetooth signals) and he even lists popularity of certain Nokia phones. It's interesting to see how much information an individual can gather using old equipment.

Georgian riot cops in Mickey Mouse gas-masks

The Rose Revolution in the former Soviet state of Georgia is collapsing under phalances of riot-cops. This is distressing, but also fascinating -- who knew that the Georgian riot cop standard issue included a freaky white Mickey Mouse mask?

Gojira is Da Bomb!!!

Godzilla Opens in Japan Sept 3rd(1954)
The first Godzilla film opened in Tokyo more than 50 years ago, and its 20,000 ton star, an enormous lizard, has been smashing up cities and towns ever since. Initially inspired by King Kong, Godzilla soon spawned several other motion pictures and TV shows. Its widespread popularity inspired Japanese filmmakers to develop a number of other monsters and heroes, such as Goro and Gamera. Why was the original Japanese version of the film heavily edited before its release in the US? More on Gojira and WW2

Superfast Laser Turns Virus Into Rubble

"In a development reminiscent of nineteenth century pseudo-science, the father-son team of Kong Thon and Shaw Wei Tsen recently demonstrated that the tobacco mosaic virus can be destroyed in vitro by nano-scale mechanical resonant vibrations induced by repeated ultra-short pulses from a laser. The total energy required is reportedly far below the threshold for human tissue damage and the technique should generalize to human pathogens. Cleaning stored blood is one obvious application."

Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government

Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government

WASHINGTON, DC—Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical...

Afro Samurai Creator Takashi Okazaki Confirms Sequel

He wanders the wilderness to avenge his father's death. He is a man of few words, trained in the ancient ways of the Japanese samurai. He sports an unruly Afro.

"Afro Samurai," the star of an animation series of the same name featuring Samuel L. Jackson, is headed for a second run on U.S. network Spike TV — and finally winning a following in its native Japan, where it will debut on the big screen on Saturday.

"I never expected Afro Samurai to get this huge. It started out as doodlings I made in college," creator Takashi Okazaki said in an interview in Tokyo.

"Now, I have Samuel doing Afro's voice, and lots of black kids thanking me for creating an awesome hero," he said. "I just can't believe it."

Afro Samurai's first season, aired as a five-part series on Spike TV early this year, follows the tale of a young samurai with a big Afro who seeks to avenge the death of his father at the hands of a mysterious warrior called Justice.

The Shock Doctrine

Klein has just published a controversial best seller entitled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it she defines shock doctrine as “the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks—wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters—to push through highly unpopular economic shock therapy.”

The metaphor of “shock” is important because her thesis stems from a contention that what works on a person also works on a nation. Think 9/11 and fear-induced politics that have eroded some of the fundamentals of what we knew as American democracy. To peer into her thinking, check out the short film by Alfonso Cuaron, who made Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men. Klein was hoping he’d send her a quote for the book jacket, but instead he assembled a team of artists and this short film.
More Shocking Video

A Nature Expedition or Merely Deer Porn?

Despite it all being very natural and above board, there remains something a little weird about groups of humans -- children included -- hiding in the bushes watching animals have sex…and paying for the privilege.

Fair Use Worth More Than Copyright To Economy

"The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report (PDF) that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the U.S. economy and add more value to the U.S. economy than copyright industries contribute. "Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion.", said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion."

AHH if i had not gone to Thialand with my wife i just might own a bar...

Thailand has become synonymous with crazy vacations where English-speaking tourists can find anything and everything under the sexual sun, but a lot of men who make the journey find something even wilder than they could have imagined—like a girlfriend or even a wife. This interesting mini-documentary about the tropical paradise looks at gents who get more from the nation's famous "bar girls" than a one-night stand. These ladies offer a companion, a travel partner, and in some cases a mate for life, while the guys offer loving attention and financial support (i.e.. a potential way out of the seedy bars and nightclubs.) Oh, and there's the sex, too, but that's just a bonus. Some dudes even chuck their lives back home for a new one on the beach, but you'll only have to give up half an hour to see the video. Check it out before you find some one to love you a very long time

How a handful of desperate innovators took special effects to new heights in two 1977 movies--Star Wars and Close Encounters

You probably recognize this shot...
...because it's the opening shot of the most famous science fiction film ever created.

That shot almost never happened. Indeed, it was so difficult to get that the man who realized it--Richard Edlund, who did visual effects for Star Wars--procrastinated shooting it until the very end of production, when there wasn't enough money left to create this scene using a gigantic, building-wide model of the star destroyer, as he'd hoped.

Instead, he took the biggest model star destroyer he had, which was three feet long, stuck a 24mm lens on the front of his camera, and got it to within 1/32nd of an inch of the bottom of the model, almost scraping off the bottom as his motion-control rig played out the scene.

It may be hard to believe now, but immediately before 1977, the watershed year that witnessed the release of both Lucas's Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's UFO epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, big-budget effects-laden movies were incredibly rare.

Via an exhaustive history of special effects at Invention and Technology.

this fanny shure got a spanking

Socialist Revolutionary Attempts to Assassinate Lenin (1918)
Fanny Kaplan was a political revolutionary who was executed for attempting to assassinate Vladimir Lenin. She became disillusioned with Lenin as a result of the conflict between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik party and decided to take action, shooting Lenin three times as he exited a Moscow factory. Though she confessed to the shooting, it has been suggested that Kaplan could not have been responsible for the assassination attempt. Why not? More...

Fascism Is Fun

Great little ad from downunder

Three ways to levitate a magic carpet

15:38 06 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Zeeya Merali

It sounds like a science fiction joke, but it isn't. What do you get when you turn an invisibility cloak on its side? A mini flying carpet.

So say physicists who believe the same exotic materials used to make cloaking devices could also be used to levitate tiny objects. In a further breakthrough, two other research groups have come a step closer to cracking the mysteries of levitation.

Scientists have levitated objects before, most famously using powerful magnetic fields to levitate a frog. But that technique, using the repulsive force of a giant magnet, requires large amounts of energy. In contrast, the latest theories exploit the natural smaller amounts of energy produced by the quantum fluctuations of empty space.
Force reversal

In May 2006, two research teams led by Ulf Leonhardt at St Andrew's University, UK, and John Pendry at Imperial College, London independently proposed that an invisibility cloak could be created from exotic materials with abnormal optical properties. Such a cloaking device – working in the microwave region - was manufactured later that year.

Dr Strangelove meets the Terminator 2

Robots have been roaming the streets of Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time -- the first time in any warzone -- the machines are carrying guns.

After years of development, three "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system" (SWORDS) robots have deployed to Iraq, armed with M249 machine guns. The 'bots "haven't fired their weapons yet," Michael Zecca, the SWORDS program manager, tells DANGER ROOM. "But that'll be happening soon."

suicide dragons bombers OH MY

AUSSIE SECURITY experts claim that Second Life and online games such as World of Warcraft are being used to train terrorists.

According to the Australian newspaper a terror campaign has been waged in Second Life which has left a trail of virtual dead and injured, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars' damage.

Apparently there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups in Second Life and they use the site for recruiting and training. This is on top of the Second Life Liberation Army, which has been responsible for some computer-coded atomic bombings of stores on the site.

Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qa'ida, said terrorists are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they can't practice in the real world.

Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments.

So we can expect more terrorist attacks involving broadswords and Heathrow airport to be closed due to suicide dragons.

Coup Against Scientists

about the noise a group of scientists is making to call attention to Executive Order 13422, going into effect today, that gives political appointees final say regarding science-based federal agency regulations. The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote a letter to two Senate committee chairs urging that questions about this executive order be asked at the confirmation hearings for the nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget. "UCS urged the Senate committee to ask [the nominee] Mr. Nussle how he would ensure that political appointees would not interfere with the work of agency scientists." Late last month the House voted to prohibit the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from spending federal money on Executive Order 13422. Democrats called the order a "power grab."

Generation Chickenhawk

Max Blumethal went to the College Republican National Convention Tour and discovered that these well-groomed young men and women strongly support the war in Iraq. But when Blumenthal asked them why they weren't fighting in Iraq, the students offered creative and entertaining excuses

Republicans with hearts and brains by 2100

First artificial life 'within months'

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 7:48pm BST 28/06/2007

Scientists could create the first new form of artificial life within months after a landmark breakthrough in which they turned one bacteria into another.

In a development that has triggered unease and excitement in equal measure, scientists took the whole genetic makeup - or genome - of a bacterial cell and transplanted it into a closely related species.

This then began to grow and multiply in the lab, turning into the first species in the process.

The team that carried out the first “species transplant” says it plans within months to do the same thing with a synthetic genome made from scratch in the laboratory.

If that experiment worked, it would mark the creation of a synthetic lifeform.

god that makes my head hurt

Michael Shermer’s
Out of Body Experiment

Michael Shermer travels to Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada, to strap on the “God Helmet” in neuroscientist Michael Persinger’s lab that duplicates out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, alien abductions, and other paranormal phenomena.

359 years to admit their crime

On June 22 1633 Galileo was Ordered to Recant Scientific Views.When he was almost 70 years old, Galileo was summoned to Rome, tried by the Inquisition, and forced to "abjure, curse, and detest" his work that stated that the sun was the center of the universe. He complied, but was nonetheless convicted on "grave suspicion of heresy" and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992, Pope John Paul II established a commission that ultimately issued an apology. it only took the them 359 years to admit Galileo was right about the earth and sun. how long before they come clean about the God Delusion as symptom of holy madness

gone till the 19th

i is gone till the 19th

see ya

Steam Trek

Steam Trek is a 1994 Star Trek fan video that recasts the voyages of the Enterprise as a late Victorian silent "moving picture" with great, Voyage to the Moon-style graphics and hilarious slates for dialog.

Dr Strangelove meets the Terminator

Robo-Snipers, "Auto Kill Zones" to Protect Israeli Borders
By Noah Shachtman June 04, 2007 | 12:04:55

For years and years, the Israeli military has been trying to figure out a way to keep Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip from crossing over into Israel proper. The latest tactic: create a set of "automated kill zones" by networking together remote-controlled machine guns, ground sensors, and drones along the 60-kilometer border.



Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome reports that "initial deployment plans for the See-Shoot system call for mounting a 0.5-caliber automated machine gun in each of several pillboxes interspersed along the Gaza border fence."

Connected via fiber optics to a remote operator station and a command-and-control center, each machine gun-mounted station serves as a type of robotic sniper, capable of enforcing a nearly 1,500-meter-deep no-go zone.

The IDF’s [Israeli Defense Forces] Southern Command is also considering adding Gill/Spike anti-tank missiles to extend the no-go zones to several kilometers, defense and industry sources here said.

The guns will be based on the Samson Remote Control Weapons Station. And the pillboxes are supposed to be positioned "at intervals of some hundreds of meters along the border, " Jane's Defence Weekly observes. They'll be "protected and secured (alarms, sensors and steel doors) and feature retractable armored covers that protect the weapon station when not in use."

Once IDF sensors locate a potential target, the operator can cue Sentry Tech to verify or engage the target through its own electro-optic (EO) day/night sensor package. The sensor-acquired information is transferred to the electro-optic package of the weapon station, which slews to the target, enabling the operator to locate and track the target... Each Sentry Tech can cover another in the event of a system failure and a single [center] can control up to 15 weapon stations."

The idea, ultimately, is to have a "closed-loop" system -- no human intervention required.

the more things change....

LA Times: Hippies-turned-homeowners vs. Punks in Haight-Ashbury
The Los Angeles Times reports on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, where some former hippies-turned-homeowners aren't thrilled with the panhandling punks on the street. As Coop points out, there are some great quotes in here:

(Arthur) Evans, 64, says (the punks) should get help, clean up or go home...

"I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long," he said. "But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior...."

"I'm sick of stepping over gangs of kids, only to be told 'Die, yuppie!' A lot of us were flower children, but we grew up," said Robert Shadoian, 58, a retired family therapist. "There are responsibilities in this world you have to meet. You can't be drugged out 24/7 and expect the world to take care of you."

(Carolyn) Mckenna said she was tired of being criticized for the "crime" of owning a home. "Haight-Ashbury is not synonymous with anarchy," she said. "It's not fair to homeowners with their entire net worth tied up here. I'd be disingenuous if I said I wasn't worried about property values."

A fuel cell that will run off the fat from your ass

"A new kind of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell has been developed that can consume any kind of fuel, from hydrogen to bio-diesel; it is over two times more efficient than traditional generators. Acumentrics is attempting to market the technology to off-grid applications (like National Parks) and also for home use as personal Combined Heat and Power plants that are extremely efficient (half as carbon-intensive as grid power.)"

Like we didnt see that comming

For the first time, the Bush administration is beginning publicly to discuss basing U.S. troops in Iraq for years, even decades to come, a subject so fraught with political land mines that officials are tiptoeing around the inevitable questions about what the long-term mission would be there.

now stick that American Spirit in your pipe and smoke it

Tobacco's radiation dose far higher than leaves at Chernobyl
If nothing else, this should worry smokers: the radiation dose from radium and polonium found naturally in tobacco can be a thousand times more than that from the caesium-137 taken up by the leaves from the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Constantin Papastefanou from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece measured radioactivity in tobacco leaves from across the country and calculated the average radiation dose that would be received by people smoking 30 cigarettes a day. He found that the dose from natural radionuclides was 251 microsieverts a year, compared with 0.199 from Chernobyl fallout in the leaves (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, vol 123, p 68).

Though the radiation dose from smoking was only 10 per cent of the average dose anyone receives from all natural sources, Papastefanou argues that it is an increased risk. "Many scientists believe that cancer deaths among smokers are due to the radioactive content of tobacco leaves and not to nicotine and tar," he says

SF writers advise on homeland security

SF writers advise on homeland security
The Homeland Security Department has called up their special team of science fiction authors, a group called Sigma, to help them imagine various terror scenarios and ways to fight the "war" on terror. Sigma members Jerry Pournelle, Arlan Andrews, greg Bear, Larry Niven, and Sage Walker, all attended a Homeland Security conference in Washington this month about science and technology. Andrews formed the group fifteen years ago and apparently the last time they met was to envision a post-nuclear age. From USA Today:

The group's motto is "Science Fiction in the National Interest." To join the group, Andrews says, you have to have at least one technical doctorate degree.

"We're well-qualified nuts," says Jerry Pournelle, co-author of the best sellers Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer and dozens of other books.

Pournelle and others say that science-fiction writers have spent their lives studying the kinds of technologies and scenarios Homeland Security officials have been tackling since the department began operating in 2003.

"We talk to a lot of strange people and read a lot of weird things," Bear says.

At the Washington conference, Bear offered to put biometrics researchers in touch with movie special-effects experts. The experts might be able to help the government determine how to match the face of someone walking through an airport to a grainy photo of a known terrorist.

Black Lagoon

Young Japanese business drone Rokuro Okajima was given a simple but important task by his company: carry a critical CD on a business trip to SE Asia. His mundane, metropolitan world gets turned upside down when a team of modern-day pirates called Black Lagoon not only steal the disk but kidnap him for ransom as well. When his employer decides that preventing the disk from falling into the wrong hands is more important than saving him, Rokuro finds himself thrown into the harrowing world of Black Lagoon, a world utterly unlike the one he knew before.
video
Wiki

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Snot siphon

Snot siphon for sucking your kids' nose clear

The Nosefrida is a suction straw for clearing snot out of your kids' nostrils. Put the rubber hose up your kid's nose, then suck on the other end (keep track of which end you use for what). A filter stops the gunk and germs from ending up in your mouth.

Rodriguez To Helm Barbarella

Rodriguez To Helm Barbarella

Robert Rodriguez (Grindhouse) has signed on to direct Barbarella, a new film adaptation of the classic SF comic-book series that Universal Pictures is fast-tracking for a 2008 worldwide release, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The character was immortalized in a 1968 movie starring Jane Fonda. Dino De Laurentiis, who produced the original film, will produce the update with Martha De Laurentiis.

Barbarella tells the story of a female mercenary who roams across the universe of a distant future, undertaking missions that require physical fearlessness, ingenuity and sensuality. The character debuted in 1962 in a French graphic magazine written and illustrated by Jean-Claude Forest and was known for her many adventures, often involving sex. There also was a musical produced in 2004.

Rodriguez is working with writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Casino Royale), who are developing a completely original adventure for Barbarella.

Rodriguez's coming on board puts to rest questions about what the in-demand director would do next, including The Jetsons at Warner Brothers and Land of the Lost at Universal. (Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.)

gasp in astonishment

Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence of Wetter Past

"You could hear people gasp in astonishment," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the Mars rovers' science instruments. "This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there."

Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer observed the patch, and Steve Ruff of Arizona State University, Tempe, noticed that its spectrum showed a high silica content. The team has laid out plans for further study of the soil patch and surrounding deposits.

Mars Rover

Black Sabbath-War Pigs (set to political footage.)

Black Sabbath-War Pigs (set to political footage.)

Pirate Bay

"The Pirate Bay has confirmed that is working on a streaming video site with user-generated content. A spokesman said the site will be modeled after YouTube but there will be 'no censorship': The Pirate Bay 'will not be the moral police' and determine what content stays or goes as is oftentimes the case with YouTube. He added that 'the community will have to do that.'" The site will be at thevideobay.org, but nothing is up there for the public yet.

Fukusaku and Oshii unite to lead Toei’s Rebellion

Fukusaku and Oshii unite to lead Toei’s Rebellion
Liz Shackleton in Cannes
16 May 2007 04:31


Japanese studio Toei is developing a sci-fi action project, Rebellion: The Killing Isle (working title), uniting two of Japan’s hottest film-making talents – Kenta Fukasaku and Mamoru Oshii.

Battle Royale II director Fukasaku is set to direct the $10m film from a script by Oshii – director of acclaimed anime titles Ghost In The Shell and its sequel Innocence.

Set in the near future in Japan, Rebellion depicts the fierce conflict between refugees from the rest of Asia, who have flooded into Japan when their economies have collapsed, and the Japanese armed police.

Toei is co-financing the project with Japan’s Cinema Investment Corporation which finances films through the Independent Film Fund (IFF) and the Angel Award for innovative new producers. The company is also in talks with Hong Kong’s E Entertainment and Korea’s Barunson Films about boarding the film as co-producers.

The cast will be headed by an as yet-to-be-confirmed Japanese actress, who will play a feisty rebel leader, alongside Taiwanese actor Dylan Kuo.

The crew will include Korean DoP Kim Sung-bok whose credits include mega-hits Shiri, JSA and Silmido. Production is scheduled to start in the second half of the year.

Toei’s Cannes line-up also includes Taku Shinjo’s For Those We Love, about Second World War kamikaze pilots, which opened on May 12 in Japan and took the number three spot.
Oshii