Toxicity

As noted in the previous section, the toxicity of chemical agents generally falls somewhere in-between that of the more deadly biological agents and that of conventional weapons, or at the lower end of the scale for weapons of mass destruction. For example, Kupperman and Trent estimate that, based on "the weight required to produce heavy casualties within a square-mile area under idealized conditions," fuel-air explosives require 320 million grams; fragmentation cluster bombs, 32 million; hydrocyanic acid, 32 million; mustard gas, 3.2 million; GB nerve gas, 800,000; a "crude" nuclear weapon (in terms of fissionable material only), 5,000; Type A botulinal toxin, 80; and anthrax spores, 8 (Kupperman and Trent 1979: 57). Similarly, it has been estimated that it would take 100 grams of the "V" nerve agent, or almost 40 pounds of potassium cyanide, to have an effect on a water supply equivalent to just one gram of typhoid culture (SCJ 1990: 3-4). Put another way, to incapacitate or kill a person drinking less than half a cup of untreated water from a 5 million-liter reservoir would require no less than 10 tons of potassium cyanide, compared to just 1/2 kg of Salmonella typhi (OTA 1991: 52).

United Way of America

United Way of America: turning American pot smokers into call center cattle!

HEATENS

Little Brother's Eye Blog

We are expecting big things from this blog...stay tuned.

US Oil Reserve

"Also, the U.S. stocks are up more than 15 million barrels over last year to 333.7 million barrels, up from 318 million barrels – so we believe it is safe to say that there will not be any gasoline shortages in the West." -Samuel Bodman
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

CrossHairs Darpa anti-sniper suit

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a38_1189521672

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]

The big understatement

On 9/6/07, Franklin Pearl > wrote:

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.

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.

A psychoanalytic perspective on violence

Explosions of violent behavior have periodically riveted public attention. While such behavior may be associated with a major psychiatric illness, there is a continuing challenge to understand the emotional underpinnings of such behavior, the sources of aggression, hostility, anger, hate, rage, and violence. Analysts from Freud to Karl Menninger to Kernberg and Kohut have speculated as to the confluence of psychological and real forces that prompt violent outbursts. Other analysts have explored the manifestations of aggression and rage in infancy and childhood. An instance of a violent outburst is presented, and underlying factors are explored. Critical elements prompting such behavior include: (1) an individual perceives a narcissistic injury that is experienced as being profoundly unfair; (2) the individual has no hope for achieving a reasonable resolution of the injury; (3) the individual reaches the decision that the injury cannot be tolerated further and must be responded to with action; (4) the individual has access to weapons to enhance the capacity and potency to respond; and (5) the individual feels a sufficient sense of potency and/or disregard of the consequences to initiate violence.

Curcumin

The 26 beliefs that drive modern medicine and the FDA

1. All herbs are dangerous and might kill you.


2. Vitamins and dietary supplements are not only useless; they're so dangerous that they should be regulated or banned.


3. 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.


4. Most diseases are caused by pharmaceutical deficiencies and can only be treated with pharmaceutical supplementation.


5. Botanicals interfere with pharmaceuticals, not the other way around. There is no such thing as a pharmaceutical that interferes with an herb.


6. Scientific progress is measured by the degree to which man dominates nature.


7. Free speech should only be protected for drug companies, not nutritional supplement companies.


8. The 300+ synthetic chemicals now found in the blood of nearly everyone are completely harmless and have no negative health effects.


9. 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.


10. 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.


11. Nature cannot be trusted. All herbs must be "standardized" to be safe. And even then, they're still useless.


12. 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.


13. 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.


14. Shamans, medicine women, herbalists, midwives and healers are all engaged in quackery based on superstition or voodoo.


15. 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.


16. 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.


17. 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.


18. 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.


19. 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.


20. The best way to help consumers is to control them by limiting their options and minimizing their access to information that might confuse them.


21. Nutrition has no role in human health. Any talk about healing with nutrition is quackery.


22. 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.


23. "Science" is whatever we say it is.


24. Anything that disagrees with our definition of science is "unscientific."


25. The "Scientific Method" is the process by which we decide what is science.


26. Conflicts of interest don't count if we all mean well.

Zinc Lowers Amyloid- Toxicity by Selectively Precipitating Aggregation Intermediates

Russian Heavy Machine Gun

This is a pretty awesome MTB video about the Russian heavy machine gun. I want one.

Cuminaldehyde

Medical Mechanica

My cousin's kid is 9 years old; he gets ten mg of Adderall XR a day. And a small cup of coffee from his loving aunt. He's mesmerized by the television as we speak. I have ear plugs in. I am in the basement.

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?

ROACH nerve agent

fipronil


indocarb

T-55 Tank Delivery

Seems to put out a lot of smoke!

Vote Ron Paul

From Wikipedia's write up on Brazil:

"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?