Lefty Blogs
williampfaff ++ ++
Russian News ++
seaton-newslinks. USA expat in Europe ++
bilegrip Asu spleen ++
us-rockstroh a rant, not a blog ++
aboutmyplanet eco ++
sfgate ++
crookedtimber ++
onthecommons ++
sjlendman ++
....
abutamam freeiraq ++
airamericaradio +
amygdalagf +
angryarab ++
annezook +
antiwar ++
norwegianity
terrorism-news
blogspot
ourtomorrow
politickybitch
welcome-to-pottersville
aviraqi
billmon ++ whiskeyB
consortiumnews ++
dahrjamailiraq
dailywarnews ++
drforbush +
english +
fallujahinpictures
freespeechradio
halcyondays ++
healingiraq
hereticalideas ++
icasualties
maru
om
boxspinning boxes

jamaicaobserver newspaper
jameswolcott +
lefarkins +
liberalgirlnextdoor ++
lonehighlander Libya, not lefty
mahablog +++ solid
maruthecrankpot +
indymedia melbourne
messopotamian +7Apr06
monkey ++
motherjones ++
fisk
nocapital +
norightturn +NZ
peakoil ++
pilger +
politicalhumor +
raedinthemiddle
rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
rigorousintuition x
hegemon ++
ruckus ++
rudepundit ++
satiricalpolitical +
scaramoucheblog ++
secretsinbaghdad ++15Ap06
Energring
aliveinbaghdad ++
riverbendblog ++
sideshow +++
signs-of-the-times +++
slashdot ++techy
talkleft ++
thinkprogress ++
thismodernworld +++
uncapitalist ++
velorution ++ bicycles
org ++Brazil peasants
warandpiece +
warfare.ru +russia military
greenpeace
allhatnocattle
alternet ++
americanpolitics
antiwar
gbruno ++YT
axisoflogic ++
blackcommentator
bobharris +
bradblog +
buckfush +funnies
buggery +
buzzflash ++
changeforamerica
countercurrents
counterpunch +++
crisispapers
crooksandliars ++?
csmonitor
dahrjamailiraqhref="http://www.dailykos.com/
davidcorn
democracynow
democracyuprising
dissidentvoice
earthfirstjournal
earthstation5
empirenotes
foodfirst
fpif
fromthewilderness
geocities
granta
grist ??
gristmagazine
guerrillanews
gulf
hizbollah
huffingtonpost ++
informationclearinghouse
infoshop +
inthesetimes x
iranmania x
ivaw
jihadunspun
juancole ++
kuro5hin ++ notlefty
kurtnimmo ++
lrb ++ Iraqi?
mahablog
lewrockwell ++
marklynas climate change
mnftiu get your war on comics
motherjones
nilemedia
nybooks
occupationwatch
oriononline
palestine
prisonplanet
rall ++ Ted Rall cartonist
ratical
redpepper
rense
robert
rollingstone
scoop
selvesandothers ++
smirkingchimp
snappingturtle
socialistworker
spiked
tblog
theiraqiroulette
theleftcoaster +
thepoorman +
tnr ++ magazine
tompaine ++ mag
traprockpeace ++
truthout +
boondocks ++
crowning3
. . . helix
Base
rain radar
Weather
worldtribunal +
worldwatch ++ $ required
zaman + Turkish news
youcantmakeitup + ?
youngfox ????????????
bareknucklepolitics videos?
popdrain videos??
discovery videos??
cs videos??
aegisIraq video??
mariyaguchi video??
iwilltryit video..
baghdadtreasure
ahram cairo newspaper
felbers
thepartyline
jfaughnan 28/04/2006 10:25AM
shrillblog +
thinkprogress +
marchforjustice + pictures
messopotamian + Iraqi not so radical, but scared (also see IraqTheModel which was a USA front, but is now also scared)
scaramoucheblog +
counterpunch
.............
blogads liberal blogs by CPM $ per view
malakandsky ++ stolid?
republicoft + black gay parent??
dailykos ++
rawstory ++
democraticunderground ++
atrios ++
workingforchange +
leftinthewest +
dembloggers +
talkingpointsmemo +
firedoglake ++
vastleft ++
pamspaulding +
americablog +
washingtonmonthly ++
mydd +
politics1 +
bartcop ++
politicalwire +
sisterstalk black lesbian?
culturekitchen ++
alternet
wonkette +++
billstclair +
freefreedomtoldhere ++ pipe bomb

......
almuajaha defunct
whynot defunct
winstonsmith defunct
samadams dormant
mquinn02 defunct
iraqblogcount ++14Apr06 suspended
iraqicomments most recent: jan2005
iraqidoctor most recent: Aug2005
georgemustgo + moved?
vialls ++Dormant (joe is dead)
warblogging Defunct
hammeroftruth quiescant?
mediastorm quiescant? +
bushwhackedusa defunct
hamasonline defunct
4Jul06

03 July 2008

Sichuan earthquake, Caterpillar tractor

Today's ironies
USA critices China's Sichuan earthquake response:

James C. Mulvenon Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a government contractor in Washington
“You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands,” Mr. Mulvenon said. “It was not a stellar example of a modern military.”

... I seem to recall New Orleans was abandoned for over a week, with nearby counties turning back refugees with gunfire, ... police stealing water from locals, helicopters refusing to land at hospitals because of gunfire, later found to be from Blackwater private goons. Later on, refugee camps were set up with Blackwater preventing anyone from leaving ..

Given similar scaled disasters, It looks like PRC would be far preferable to USA, particularly poor regions


Caterpillar an equal opportunity people crusher?
Caterpillar tractor used to crush non-palestinians:
"a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem rammed his bulldozer into several cars and buses Wednesday, killing three people before Israeli police shot him dead."
... an attempt to equal the score of protesters and old people crushed in their homes by zionist driven Caterpillars?.
[June 11, 2008 – Chicago, IL] A shareholder resolution calling on the Caterpillar Board of Directors to report on foreign sales of weapons-related equipment and products, including the destination of those products, received a 3.3% vote at the annual shareholder meeting today in Chicago [pending final certification]. It met the minimum threshold of support required for placement on the ballot next year.

jewishvoiceforpeace


aaa
Rachel Ray wearing a (Paisley?) keffiyeh in a Dunkin Donuts ad
Thus simultaneously offending AIPAIC , Ulster Unionists, and the Diabetes Prevention Association ?
___________________________________________________|
aaa
Mccains daughter Meghan wears one.
___________________________________________________


Tibet is open for tourists again
aaa
about

My family ... although quite conservative, they sometimes travel to odd places. My little brother was in the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon when the Burmese military sealed it off. He noted the absense of weapons discipline (fingers inside trigger guards) and forbore to take pics.
My big Sister recently in PRC missed the Sichuan earthquake by 2 days and missed Tibet by about the same. I can forgive the lack of award-winning photos, but its hard to stifle my envy.




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02 July 2008

Climate going Permian, Cosmic Jerkiness, Penguins in Peril, Vaccines and Mitochondria

Climate going Permian on your arse

More carbon dioxide is being discharged into the atmosphere now than even the worst-case scenario in last year's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Adelaide University's Barry Bock told the Canberra conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, and anticipates a temperature rise of six degrees. Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth. "Oxygen isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch [the release of the ocean's methane hydrates] than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene":

Sedimentary layers show that most of the world's plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a "fungal spike" as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.

One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
...
"We are at or exceeding the fossil-fuel-intensive scenario, which the latest IPCC report didn't cover because they thought it was too much," Dr Pittock said.
theage

Found via Rigorous Intuition
who does a lovely line in Lovecraftian doom.

Today Its cold here. The 17 sparrows who gather on my power line to chirp a survival-check chorus after each storm havnt yet made it out from the trees, I hear a few cheeps. In the Southerly storm the corridor boomed like a giant church organ pipe. 700 wind turbines couldn't warm us. I wish I had a car. We await the meltdown as Emperor penguin chicks fall through cracks in the ice.


Cosmic Jerkiness
jerk is the rate of change of acceleration... ie the 3rd derivtive
Do we really need a name for the fourth derivative, telling us how the jerk is changing with time? Apparently we do, as it has been denoted the “snap.” I just learned this from this new paper:

Cosmic Jerk, Snap and Beyond
Authors: Maciej Dunajski, Gary Gibbons

Abstract: We clarify the procedure for expressing the Friedmann equation in terms of directly measurable cosmological scalars constructed out of higher derivatives of the scale factor...
The best part is this footnote:

The analogous expressions involving 5th and 6th derivatives are known as crackle and pop. This terminology goes back to a 1932 advertisement of Kellogg’s Rice Crispies which `merrily snap, crackle and pop in a bowl of milk.

(found on scienceblogs somewhere forgot where sorry)


aaa
A protester wearing a mask of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice walks past police officers in Kyoto, western Japan, where foreign ministers from top industrialized countries open two-day meeting Thursday, June 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)">
...so cute! So creative! So... Condilicious
-from: Princess Sparkle Pony
blogspot


________________________________________________________________
on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London


Penguins in Peril
he world’s largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. That population probably peaked at about 400,000 pairs between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and today is half that, she said.

There are similar stories from other regions. African penguins decreased from 1.5 million pairs a century ago to just 63,000 pairs by 2005, Boersma claimed. Galapagos Islands penguins, the only species whose range extends into the Northern Hemisphere, now number around 2,500, about a quarter of what their population was when Boersma first studied them in the 1970s.

...in 2006 as climate anomalies wreaked havoc on the same population of Emperor penguins featured in the popular 2005 film “March of the Penguins.” The colony bred in the same place as in other years, ... in September, with the chicks just more than half-grown, the adults apparently sensed danger and uncharacteristically marched the colony more than three miles to different ice.
the ice they chose remained intact the longest, but in. late September a strong storm broke it up and the chicks were forced into the water... The likely result, Boersma said, was a total colonywide breeding failure that year.

... El Niño Southern Oscillation events, which affect weather worldwide, seem to occur more often. During those times, ocean currents that carry the small fish that penguins eat are pushed farther away from the islands and the birds often starve ...


Mercury and Mitochondria
nytimes
...nearly seven years after the preservative was removed from childhood vaccines, autism rates seem unaffected.
The Poling case, however, offered advocates a new theory: that vaccines may cause or contribute to an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which in turn causes autism. Although autism is common among children with mitochondrial disorders, ....
700,000 people in the United States had flawed mitochondria, and in roughly 30,000 of them the genetic flaws were expansive enough to cause disease.


This is You

aaa
Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex
- This may be a radical new view of You
I dont really understand the text, possibly an example of New Science where huge datasets are mined for correlations, we dont need your Kepler & Newton?

MRI using an Achieva 3T Philips scanner souped up to the max?

degree and strength of a given node measure the extent to which the node is connected to the rest of the network, while centrality and efficiency capture how many short paths between other parts of the network pass through the node. A node with high degree makes many connections (where each connection is counted once), while a node with high strength makes strong connections (where strength is equal t
o the sum of connection density or weight). A node with high betweenness centrality lies on many of the shortest paths that link other nodes in the network to one another. A node with high efficiency is itself found to be, on average, at a short distance from other nodes in the network.


seems like a sort of Brain Google.. I think they said there are 8 main regions, with one most important ... That might explain those 7 voices I hear arguing at the back of my mind ...
_________________________________________________



, , ,


29 June 2008

Wound Healing, LED array

Near IR light makes wounds heal faster
LED arrays at 660 nm seem to be the favourite
NASA found that wounds heal slower in microgravity, they seem to have done the best research.
Red LED arrays are carried on Space Shuttles and Nuclear submarines. This doesnt absolutely rule out 'woo factor' but these are serious space constrained situations.
Lacking LED arrays, I sometimes use an ordinary incandescant light bulb up close, but this may have a burning effect.
I dont know if NZ medecine uses this therapy


ijdvl
Abstract
A case of 75-year-old male patient with a non-healing ulcer over left sole is reported. Patient was a known diabetic with CCF. The ulcer was not healing for one month with routine treatment. The patient was given BIOBEAM 660 therapy every alternate days for a month which led to .
Keywords: Biobeam 660, Non-healing ulcer, Diabetes

.......................................
informaworld


Abstract ackground and aims. Blepharoplasties can be associated with sequelae-related patient downtime, often extended or reinforced by periocular laser ablative resurfacing. The present controlled study examined the effects of a new-generation LED phototherapy system on enhancing wound healing following such combination surgery.

Methods. Two males and eight females participated in the trial, with ages ranging from 44 to 59 years (average 52.3 years). Following blepharoplasty and Er:YAG/CO2 laser ablative resurfacing, one-half of each subject's face was treated with the red LED therapy (20 min, 96 J/cm2, 633 nm), the contralateral half being the unirradiated control. Patients reported subjectively on pain levels and resolution. Resolution of erythema, edema, bruising and days to healing were independently evaluated from the clinical photography. All findings were compared between the treated and untreated sides.

Results. In all instances, the LED therapy-treated side was statistically significantly superior to the unirradiated control by a factor of two to three.

Conclusions. In this small series of 10 patients, red LED phototherapy after blepharoplasty and laser ablative resurfacing cut the time to resolution of side effects and the healing time by one-half to one-third compared with contralateral unirradiated controls.
.....................
elixa
aaa
56 LED array 660nm (red) 4000 mcd brightness.
Includes 110v AC adaptor (220-240v $10. Indicate at checkout) Array approx. 3/4"x2"x3" $94.95

660nm (red) LED light speeds healing of wounds, infections, and other conditions to a depth of about 1" by increasing cellular ATP and energy while reducing pain. Research indicates that red light kills the bacteria that cause tooth decay and some abcesses.
.........................
nationalwriterssyndicate
NASA LED’s have proven to stimulate wound healing at near-infrared wavelengths of 680, 730 and 880 nm in laboratory animals, and have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for human trials. Furthermore, near-infrared LED light has quintupled the growth of fibroblasts and muscle cells in tissue culture. The NASA LED arrays are light enough and mobile enough to have already flown on the Space Shuttle numerous times
.....................
elixa
at the University of Chicago, researchers discovered that the average wavelength of cell tissue in the human body ranged between 600 nanometers and 720 nm; 660 is the mid-point. So in essence, the reason a 660 nm works better than any other single frequency is because it is closer to the resonant frequency of cell tissue.
..........
trymax
the essential basic light unit should contain a 660 nanometer red LED of 4,000 - 6,000 milli-candles with both a continuous and a 250 pulse-per-second light beam selector.
.........
healthlink
An LED array is currently on board a US Navy nuclear submarine for treatment of potential training injuries. Dr. Whelan is a commander in the Navy and a diving medical officer for the Naval Special Warfare Command, which includes the SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) teams. Dr. Whelan has been inducted into the NASA Space Technology Hall of Fame for his research into the use of LEDs for wound healing and the treatment of brain tumors.
ingentaconnect
To study 670-nm light effects on incisional injury, animals were left unexposed or exposed to equal doses of high-, medium-, or low-flux light. Burn injuries were treated with high-flux light or left unexposed. Healing was assessed by measurement of the burn area and the gap remaining to closure of incisional injury.
RESULTS Mice exposed to 670-nm red light showed significantly faster healing than control mice. High, medium, and low fluxes of light were all effective after incisional injury. In burn injury, there was improvement in wound healing initially, but the time to repair was unchanged.
CONCLUSIONS A 670-nm LED red light source accelerates healing in skin of SKH-1 hairless mice after incisional injuries, but is not as effective for burn injuries. These data that suggest red light exposure may be helpful in postoperative wound repair.



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