Chavez, Narnia,Blackwater, Condi, Economo neurons, Dyson, oil-palm

Mad Science

Sociability neurons, recently evolved?
neurotransponder
class of bipolar neurons, known as von Economo neurons (VEN), are found in layer Vb of human neocortex.
VENs are found in a select few cortical areas that receive inputs from numerous brain regions; the fronto-insular cortex (FI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
it is thought that VENs play a role in intuition. The FI and ACC, where VENs are located, are active during social situations; when we experience humor, trust, empathy, guilt, when we engage in deception, or when we must determine another's mental state. All of these scenarios carry a high degree of uncertainty. Intuition allows us to overcome uncertainty, to make quick decisions..
ENs represent a phylogenic specialization of the hominid line, thus they have arisen in the last 12-15 million years. As such, natural selection has had only a short time to refine their functional role, suggesting that they may be particularly susceptible to dysfunction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, VENs have been implicated in autism and may be selectively vulnerable to degeneration in Alzheimer's Disease.

The phylogeny of VENs make sense given their evolutionary context. The great apes are highly social animals that must engage in rapid decision-making to navigate complex social environs. Of the great apes, the most solitary is the orangutan. Similarly, they display the fewest VENs. Humans and bonobos have arguably the most complex social interactions, and display not only high numbers of VENs but also a similar clustered distribution, whereas in the common chimpanzee, gorilla, and orang, VENs are found in isolated arrangements.
[this whole thing smells like a parody,but AFAICT its a genuine story.]

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Science sites
badastronomy
silphium
ubcbotanicalgarden
balancinglife
edgeDyson on Edge..
edge
Biology has taken a completely different approach. There is no von Neumann address matrix, just a molecular soup, and the instructions say simply "DO THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along." The results are far more robust. There is no unforgiving central address authority, and no unforgiving central clock. This ability to take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is exactly the ability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organisms from information processing by digital computers.
Turing, who in his 1948 report on intelligent machinery to the National Physical Laboratory advised that "intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search."
[Google] "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

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americanscientist Radiation from Bomb test
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__books Dava Sobel recommends:
Bartusiak Marcia :Through a Universe Darkly 1993
Cole K. C. :The Universe and the Teacup 1998 <<
Lord M. G. : Astro-Turf 2005
Panek Richard :Seeing and Believing (Viking, 1998)
Weiner Jonathan :The Beak of the Finch (Knopf, 1994)
Gingerich Owen :The Book Nobody Read (Walker, 2004)

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biofuels destroy jungles:
monbiot
in 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 10^18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota". I
...there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet a 380th of our demand for road transport fuel. Beyond that, the trouble begins.
..The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world's most carbon-intensive fuel.
..Between 1985 and 2000," it found, "the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia". In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms.
.. Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting national park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orangutan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.

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Amazon jungle drying out..
nytimes
In mid-October, the governor of Amazonas State, Eduardo Braga, decreed a "state of public calamity," which remains in effect as the drought's impact on the economy, public health and food and fuel supplies deepens. But other Brazilian states have also been severely affected, as have Amazon regions in neighboring countries like Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

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goodnewsblog
cell phone locator leads to rescue
Now is it only on 911 calls that USA phones spy on their owners location?

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nzherald
Borneo cat-fox another new mammal
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Politics as usual

truthdig
Chavez
Particularly worrisome to the conservative{sic} Bush administration was that Chavez was only the most jagged edge of a mounting trend of left-of-center leaders coming to power in Latin America: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, President Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and President Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay. A moderate socialist-led coalition was also in power in Chile. And a more radical movement was gaining popularity in Bolivia and its leader, Evo Morales, was increasingly considered a presidential contender.

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spartacist
but
Venezuela: Populist Nationalism vs. Proletarian Revolution
Chávez will not destroy the agencies of repression that are at the core of the bourgeois state—the judiciary, the police, the prison system and, “above all,” the army—because he administers the bourgeois state. Sweeping away the dictatorship of capital in Venezuela means sweeping away the bourgeois regime through proletarian revolution, not lecturing the capitalist strongman as though he were a wayward apprentice. Indeed, as his left camp followers complain, Chávez has not even purged many individual recalcitrants from his military and police command, as happens after almost every Latin American coup.

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truthdig
Narnia
....He’s an empire-building businessman with an agenda, whose companies have donated more than $700,000 to Republican causes. ..When we buy a ticket to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” we not only put money in Anschutz’s pocket, we feed the right’s insidious assault on popular entertainment--a church-state conflation just as threatening to American democracy as religion’s incursions on the White House, if not more so.

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interventionmag
..Chalmers Johnson was once a CIA analyst; Director Richard Helms recruited him for his expertise in peasant nationalism and revolutionary war. Johnson lists five military bases being constructed apparently for the long haul:
• a part of Baghdad International Airport
• Tallil air base to the south
• one on the western frontier with Syria
• Bashur air field to the north
• the Anaconda operating base currently in use
These should be seen, Johnson says, in conjunction with the “1,600 square miles out of Kuwait's 6,900 square miles” the U.S. plans to keep “that we now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.”

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dailystar
16/12/2005 10:49AM
in the north: a roadside bomb aimed at an Iraqi security patrol killed a child in Samarra, police said, a Trade Ministry employee was shot dead in the oil refining town of Baiji, and a roadside bomb in Mosul killed two policemen and wounded three.

Small explosive devices damaged three empty polling stations in the Sunni Arab city of Fallujah on Wednesday, police said. No one was hurt but 4,000 ballot papers were stolen.

"There is a quiet confidence that things are going to go well," the UN envoy to Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, said.

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smirkingchimp
They can unleash their private army on the "unfittest" when the need arises, whether it be within America's borders or otherwise. New Orleans is a prime example. 150 highly trained Blackwater quasi-military professionals openly armed with assault weapons descended on a tragedy-stricken city. As hurricane victims taking necessities were called "looters" and shoot to kill orders were in effect, those who value property over people saw to it that their interests were well-protected.

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independent
thousand days ago, British forces were greeted in Basra with the proverbial flowers. Now the only time most inhabitants of Iraq's second largest-city see any sign of British troops on the streets is when they pass through every three days or so in a heavy armoured column.

Foot patrols by soldiers wearing berets are largely a thing of the past, except in a few safe areas on the fringes of the city. Routine movements between the four main bases around Basra are now entirely by helicopter, even between two sites only five miles apart. On the brief flight between the air base and Basra Palace, the headquarters for British civilian staff, a crew member swivelled a machine gun about as the city slipped past the half-open loading ramp, and flares were fired to decoy heat-seeking missiles.

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"All who expressed their devotion to human rights and the rule of law have a special obligation to help the Iraqis bring to justice one of the world's most murderous tyrants," Dr Rice said.
Justice... that would be the slow hanging of Bush jnr, what else?

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reason
"According to law enforcement officials, Alpizar 'uttered threatening words that included a sentence to the effect that he had a bomb.'" It is a long way from running up and down aisle shouting about having a bomb to using unspecified "threatening words." What sort of sentence includes threatening words "to the effect" that one has a bomb—but apparently does not include the word bomb?
The Post-Gazette was less interested in asking these questions than in helping the feds backtrack, concluding, "[B]y all initial accounts, the marshals did their job." Except for the accounts of the passengers on the plane who said they never heard Alpizar mention a bomb.

Chavez Narnia Anaconda Qazi Blackwater Basra Condi Alpizar von Economo neurons Dyson oil-palm