12/14/2007
12/03/2007
10/07/2007
9/15/2007
US Oil Reserve
Secretary of Energy August 8, 2006
333.7
------- = 16.09 days @ full capacity
20.73
Oil - consumption: 20.73 million bbl/day (2004 est.)
Public debt: 64.7% of GDP (2005 est.)
Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html
9/12/2007
9/07/2007
The Long Now Project clock details...
Time calculations
Options considered for the part of the clock that converts time source (for example, a pendulum) to display units (for example, clock hands) include electronics, hydraulics, fluidics, and mechanics.
A problem with using a conventional gear train (which has been the standard mechanism for the past millennium) is that gears necessarily require a ratio relationship between the timing source and the display. The required accuracy of the ratio required increases with the amount of time. (For instance, for a short period of time the count of 29.5 days per lunar month may suffice, but over 10,000 years the number 29.5305882 is a much more accurate choice.)
Achieving such precise ratios with gears is possible, but awkward; similarly, gears degrade over time in accuracy and efficiency due to the deleterious effects of friction (which is to say, they get smaller. Smaller gears move faster, throwing precise calculations seriously out of joint). Instead, the clock uses binary digital logic, implemented mechanically in a sequence of stacked binary adders (or as Hillis, their inventor calls them, serial bit-adders). In effect, the conversion logic is a simple digital computer (more specifically, a digital differential analyser), implemented with mechanical wheels and levers instead of typical electronics. The computer uses a 28-bit number representation, with each bit represented by a mechanical lever or pin that can be in one of two positions. This binary logic can only keep track of absolute time, like a stopwatch; to convert from absolute to local solar time (that is, time of day), a cam subtracts (or adds) from the cam slider, which the adders move.
Another advantage of the digital computer over the gear train is that it is more evolvable. For instance, the ratio of day to years depends on Earth's rotation, which is slowing at a noticeable but not very predictable rate. This could be enough to throw the phase of the Moon, for example, off by a few days over 10,000 years. The digital scheme allows that conversion ratio to be adjusted, without stopping the clock, if the length of the day changes in a different way than expected.
Bioregionalism
Bioregionalism is a term used to describe an approach to political, cultural, and environmental issues based on naturally-defined regional areas, consistent with the concept of bioregions, or ecoregions. These areas are usually based on a combination of physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries and soil and terrain characteristics. Bioregionalism stresses that the determination of a bioregion is also a cultural phenomenon — with phrases such as "the politics of place" and "terrain of consciousness" appearing in bioregionalist writings — and places emphasis on local populations, knowledge and solutions.[1]
9/06/2007
The big understatement
Glen Beck is the most dangerous person in america....
paraphrase: Fred Thompson is the best choice because he looks presidential, he is 6'5" and weighs X pounds, so he looks tough, etc....and we shouldn't be afraid of having an actor as a president, I mean last time we had one it was....i don't know....perfect?"
Christ....
What part was perfect? all the stuff being delivered by Ollie in those DC 10s? El Salvadoran death squads? Recession? Refusal to acknowledge AIDS? Nuclear Chicken?I wonder what more intrigue there is to find in this quirky little episode. Why would they report the event? If it had some actual military exercise aspect then I suppose...but since it was clearly labeled as a mistake...
The big understatement being nuclear chicken.
8/31/2007
Professor Build Budget Supercomputer
"This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct."
Microwulf has been measured to process 26.25 gigaflops, or 26.25 billion double-precision floating point instructions, per second. It achieves this performance by relying on four dual-core motherboards connected by an 8-port Gigabyt Ethernet switch. The connected components form a three-tiered system that looks like a triple-decker sandwich.
Check out the specs.
8/28/2007
A psychoanalytic perspective on violence
The 26 beliefs that drive modern medicine and the FDA
- All herbs are dangerous and might kill you.
- Vitamins and dietary supplements are not only useless; they're so dangerous that they should be regulated or banned.
- The only thing more dangerous than dietary supplements is allowing the public to have access to accurate information about dietary supplements. To maintain control, the public must be kept ignorant of the medicinal uses of all substances other than patented chemicals.
- Most diseases are caused by pharmaceutical deficiencies and can only be treated with pharmaceutical supplementation.
- Botanicals interfere with pharmaceuticals, not the other way around. There is no such thing as a pharmaceutical that interferes with an herb.
- Scientific progress is measured by the degree to which man dominates nature.
- Free speech should only be protected for drug companies, not nutritional supplement companies.
- The 300+ synthetic chemicals now found in the blood of nearly everyone are completely harmless and have no negative health effects.
- The FDA is incapable of making mistakes, and therefore, drug companies should be granted full immunity against consumer lawsuits surrounding the injuries and deaths caused by FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. It is impossible for an FDA-approved drug to cause the death of anyone, because the FDA is infallible.
- There is no need to safety test chemicals used in cosmetics and personal care products because the skin doesn't absorb chemicals. Unless, of course, we're talking about transdermal drug delivery products like the anti-smoking patch, in which case the skin readily absorbs chemicals.
- Nature cannot be trusted. All herbs must be "standardized" to be safe. And even then, they're still useless.
- Phytochemicals only act in isolation. Scientists can understand the physiological action of plant chemicals by isolating them, synthesizing them, and testing them one by one. There is no such thing as "synergistic action" with phytochemicals.
- The only use for plant chemicals is to serve as ideas from which drug companies can synthesize patented drugs. Phytochemicals (phytonutrients) have no inherent value and their use for preventing, treating or curing any disease should be outlawed and stripped from modern civilization's knowledge base.
- Shamans, medicine women, herbalists, midwives and healers are all engaged in quackery based on superstition or voodoo.
- There is no such thing as bioenergy, intuition, mind-body medicine, quantum physics or therapeutic touch. The entire universe operates only on the physical and chemical levels. There is nothing beyond those two levels yet to be discovered or explored.
- We already know everything there is to know. No new discoveries are necessary, nor are any paradigm shifts in scientific medicine. It is important that we all reject any new ideas or beliefs that threaten our existing ideas or beliefs.
- Drug corporations should be protected because they have the best interests of the general public in mind. The future health of the entire world depends on the research being conducted right now by drug companies.
- Americans are lucky to pay the highest prices in the world for medication. Everyone else has to settle for "bargain" pricing, but Americans get the honor of knowing their dollars help fund the shareholder profits of the world's wealthiest corporations, all of which deserve unlimited financial riches because they are saving the world from disease.
- Drugs from Canada are so dangerous that they cannot be allowed to be touched or swallowed by superior Americans. Canadian drugs might be suitable for exporting to third world nations, but not to America.
- The best way to help consumers is to control them by limiting their options and minimizing their access to information that might confuse them.
- Nutrition has no role in human health. Any talk about healing with nutrition is quackery.
- The human body is incapable of healing itself. Health can only be enhanced through chemical or surgical intervention. Patients have no role in determine their own health outcome.
- "Science" is whatever we say it is.
- Anything that disagrees with our definition of science is "unscientific."
- The "Scientific Method" is the process by which we decide what is science.
- Conflicts of interest don't count if we all mean well.
8/25/2007
8/22/2007
8/20/2007
8/14/2007
Medical Mechanica
I wonder how it is that this has come to pass? Rather, how it is that loving, if busy, parents can submit their children to the merciless will of pharmaco-allah? Does this reflect an improvement in the standard of living, or in child-care management in general? If so, why not export the revolution?
In the begining was the TV and children saw it and it was good.
Then there were the psycho-stimulants that produced pharmacologically managed childhood for when the electronic eye could not be accessed.
One wonders what is next? Maybe some sort of teddy ruxbin type animal that dispenses pills AND advice and whose face is a television? Who knows?
MedicalMecanica anyone?
7/26/2007
7/20/2007
7/18/2007
Vote Ron Paul
"Sam is not so much beset by malicious characters as he is by a vast, impersonal, and indifferent social structure that is both hypocritical and pedantic for its own sake. The individual villains are neither malicious nor sadistic, they are merely doing their jobs.
The jilted sense of priorities that adult life often entails are also another theme. The elevation of meaningless considerations of status and vanity over personal happiness and well being is continuously portrayed throughout the movie. At one point, a police officer encourages a prisoner to cooperate, not because he is about to be tortured but because prolonged imprisonment could jeopardize his credit rating."
Isn't America turning into this dystopia? Don't we need Ron Paul in the White house to stop this madness?
6/12/2007
Toxic fumes may have made gunman snap
Whatever led to Cho Seung-hui's madness may have been exacerbated by tetrachloroethylene, a toxic chemical his parents have been chronically exposed to in their career as dry cleaners, one expert suspects.
Dr. Dolores Malaspina, chairwoman of New York University School of Medicine's psychiatry department, recently found that kids of dry cleaners are 3-1/2 times more likely to develop schizophrenia.
Cho's parents, Cho Sung and Cho Hyang, have worked in dry cleaning for 15 years.
"The toxin [tetrachloroethylene] ... gets in the clothing, the hair and the skin of everyone in a dry-cleaning household," says Malaspina. "The vapors are very volatile - it's an airborne toxin."
Children of dry cleaners would come in contact with the dangerous fumes during likely visits to his parents' workplace. But the parents also would carry home inhalable particles each day they returned from work.
Cho has never been officially diagnosed with schizophrenia, but his documented mental problems and family work history make for a "very intriguing" argument for such a diagnosis, said Malaspina.
The doctor did the study while at the New York Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. She and other researchers studied 88,829 Israeli children born to parents who worked as dry cleaners.
Tetrachloroethylene - aka perchloroethylene, "Perc" or "PCE" - also has been linked to cancer and birth defects. Though it's absorbed slowly across skin, the mere presence can release inhalable vapors.
Organic dry cleaners do not use the chemical.
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says chronic exposure to Perc "can result in memory and concentration impairment, vision disturbances, dizziness, irritability, ataxia, sleep disturbances and peripheral neuropathy."
New York City requires dry cleaners using Perc to have special air permits and use up-to-date equipment.
Last July, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered all Perc machines out of residential buildings by July 2009, over fears that Perc vapors may be dangerous to residents. An estimated 75,000 New Yorkers live in buildings housing Perc machines.
PLEASE SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER!?
WHY YES YOU MAY!
6/10/2007
Hey Bitches! Someone cleans up another wiki article I started!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_River_City_Project
To make the world work in the shortest possible time
through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense
or the disadvantage of anyone. -RBF
5/25/2007
5/24/2007
2/26/2007
1/14/2007
There's a reason they call it X
Last night took approx 100mg MDMA (green pill, about 3mm diameter, Fast Forward sign on it).
Started timer. Went out for a walk in the rain on the nature trail that runs behind the hyper center. A strange ether-real twlight but no noticable effects. Decided to return home to drink some Yerba Mate, a South American beverage similiar to coffee but longer lasting and w/o many of coffees side effects.
Decided to sit down and meditate given that outside it was cold and rainey. Some initial feeling started about ten to fifteen minutes into the meditation. By twenty five minutes (approx 1 hour 40 minutes by the drug timer) it hit me.
When I say it hit me, I mean it hit me so hard and fast I thought it was adulterated with another substance, possible a 2-C analog? My vision blurred, my heart raced, and I felt a surge of swelling energy. I thought best to acidify my system so, with hands shaking in felt panic I popped 500 mg of vitamin C. I calmed down a little after that and realized it was just going to be a plain old X roll, but it was very powerful.
So powerful I started to close my eyes and just listen to the irock player. I was almost nodding off, not to sleep mind you but from the sensual body high. I wanted to read, but my eyes were having real troulbe focusing (pupil dialation) and mystagimus (eye wobbling). Jaw Clenching wasnt that bad but it was there.
I was, for about two and half hours in total exstacy. The greek root of exstacy, ekstasis, is translated as meaning displacement or being outside (one's self). I was having a good time just lying on the floor writing in pure joy. I ate a banna; it was the best damn banna I ever tasted.
This pill I bought for twenty dollars gives us a clue. I'd had another pill roughly same dimensions and diameter and clearly MDMA around this time last year (at Petit Jean state park). Needless to say it was not as good as this green fast forwards stamped pill. Some other pills I have taken here and there struck me as being "flat". They never acheive the sort of high that you expect/want from a good MDMA roll.
Without going into the technical details, this green pill was from a chemist whose synthesis method had a very high yield "and" stero control, meaning the isomer of MDMA was specifically produced. As Shulgin points out MDMA has isomers. " With MDMA, the usual assignments of activity to optical isomers is reversed from all of the known psychedelic drugs. The more potent isomer is the "S" isomer, which is the more potent form of amphetamine and methamphetamine."
You can read more about the isomers: http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal109.shtml
What a roll! Wowza is all I can say. It was really fantastic. Super-duper hero like even. Well worth the twenty dollars spent.
At about the two hours thirty mark I ate some more vitamin C and 100 mg of 5-htp, the latter is a serotonine precursor. I got a good nights rest with the help of melatonin and feel very good in the recovery phase. The NIDA drug warriors claim that MDMA kills brain cells, etc. What they don't say is how effective modest amounts of vitamin C are at preventing oxidative stress and free radical damage. Also, loading with a serotonine precursor prior to or after the roll greatly reduces or elminates altogether the MDMA hangover many experince.
Peace,
