‘Anti-Genocide Paparazzi’
http://www.satsentinel.org/maps
http://www.satsentinel.org/reports

“…In what may be the most ambitious project of its kind, the United Nations and human rights advocates in the US are turning to satellite images and the Web to monitor the border between northern and southern Sudan, as the south prepares for a referendum on Jan. 9 that could split the country in two. The concern: If the referendum in southern Sudan supports independence for the oil-rich, largely Christian region, the country once again could dissolve into a brutal civil war. By combining on-the-ground reports with a nearly daily review of commercial-satellite images, the project’s participants say they hope to head off potential large-scale human rights abuses, should a conflict break out.

“We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching,” said Clooney, a co-founder of Not on Our Watch, a human rights group funding the effort, in a statement. “It’s a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight.” National intelligence services in the United States and for other major countries are widely acknowledged to have access to more-detailed images than remote-sensing companies can provide. But those images tend to remain classified and out of the public spotlight. The new effort announced Wednesday – the Satellite Sentinel Project – will post its images on a publicly available website, in hopes of mobilizing public opinion in ways that pressure governments to respond to any abuses the effort detects…”

excerpt from ‘The BLAST SHACK’
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/crypto-blast-shack-finally-goes-off/
by Bruce Sterling / 22 December 2010

“…It’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia. Part of this dull, icy feeling, I think, must be the agonizing slowness with which this has happened. At last — at long last — the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. Those “cypherpunks,” of all people. Way back in 1992, a brainy American hacker called Timothy C. May made up a sci-fi tinged idea that he called “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” This exciting screed — I read it at the time, and boy was it ever cool — was all about anonymity, and encryption, and the Internet, and all about how wacky data-obsessed subversives could get up to all kinds of globalized mischief without any fear of repercussion from the blinkered authorities. If you were of a certain technoculture bent in the early 1990s, you had to love a thing like that. As Tim blithely remarked to his fellow encryption enthusiasts, “The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely,” and then Tim started getting really interesting. Later, May described an institution called “BlackNet” which might conceivably carry out these aims. Nothing much ever happened with Tim May’s imaginary BlackNet. It was the kind of out-there concept that science fiction writers like to put in novels. Because BlackNet was clever, and fun to think about, and it made impossible things seem plausible, and it was fantastic and also quite titillating. So it was the kind of farfetched but provocative issue that ought to be properly raised within a sci-fi public discourse. Because, you know, that would allow plenty of time to contemplate the approaching trainwreck and perhaps do something practical about it. Nobody did much of anything practical. Tim May and his imaginary BlackNet were the sci-fi extrapolation version of the NSA. A sort of inside-out, hippiefied NSA. Crypto people were always keenly aware of the NSA, for the NSA were the people who harassed them for munitions violations and struggled to suppress their academic publications. Creating a BlackNet is like having a pet, desktop NSA. Except, that instead of being a vast, federally-supported nest of supercomputers under a hill in Maryland, it’s a creaky, homemade, zero-budget social-network site for disaffected geeks.

That is how we come to the dismal saga of Wikileaks and its ongoing Cablegate affair, which is a melancholy business, all in all. Private Manning was a young American, a hacker-in-uniform, bored silly while doing scarcely necessary scutwork on a military computer system in Iraq. Private Manning had dozens of reasons for becoming what computer-security professionals call the “internal threat.” His war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction. The military occupation of Iraq was endless. Manning, a tender-hearted geek, was overlooked and put-upon by his superiors. Although he worked around the clock, he had nothing of any particular military consequence to do. It did not occur to his superiors that a bored soldier in a poorly secured computer system would download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. Because, well, why? They’re very boring. Soldiers never read them. The malefactor has no use for them. They’re not particularly secret. They’ve got nothing much to do with his war. He knows his way around the machinery, but Bradley Manning is not any kind of blackhat programming genius. Instead, he’s very like Jerome Kerveil, that obscure French stock trader who stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself.

Jerome Kerveil, just like Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his bosses never knew it had. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerveil and Manning that their threat can’t be imagined. A weird hack like that is self-defeating, and it’s sure to bring terrible repercussions to the transgressor. But then the sad and sordid days grind on and on; and that blindly potent machinery is just sitting there. Sitting there, tempting the user. Bradley Manning believes the sci-fi legendry of the underground. He thinks that he can leak a quarter of a million secret cables, protect himself with neat-o cryptography, and, magically, never be found out. So Manning does this, and at first he gets away with it, but, still possessed by the malaise that haunts his soul, he has to brag about his misdeed, and confess himself to a hacker confidante who immediately ships him to the authorities. No hacker story is more common than this. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He only has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people. The guy preferred his hacker identity to his sworn fidelity to the uniform of a superpower. This mild nobody has become super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a computer, he’s strictly confined and, no doubt, he’s horribly bored.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB6Ipiy27eo

Then there is Julian Assange, who is a pure-dye underground computer hacker. He’s the silver-plated real deal, the true avant-garde. Julian is a child of the underground hacker milieu, the digital-native as twenty-first century cypherpunk. The guy has surrounded himself with the cream of the computer underground, wily old rascals like Rop Gonggrijp and the fearsome Teutonic minions of the Chaos Computer Club. Assange has had many long, and no doubt insanely detailed, policy discussions with all his closest allies, about every aspect of his means, motives and opportunities. Julian Assange doesn’t want to be in power; he has no people skills at all, and nobody’s ever gonna make him President Vaclav Havel. He’s certainly not in for the money, because he wouldn’t know what to do with the cash; he lives out of a backpack, and his daily routine is probably sixteen hours online. I don’t even think Assange is all that big on ego; I know authors and architects, so I’ve seen much worse than Julian in that regard. He’s just what he is; he’s something we don’t yet have words for. He’s a different, modern type of serious troublemaker. Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does. The chances of that ending well are about ten thousand to one. And I don’t doubt Assange knows that. This is the kind of guy who once wrote an encryption program called “Rubberhose,” because he had it figured that the cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to finesse his own human frailty.

The one grand certainty about the consumers of Cablegate is that diplomats are gonna be reading those stolen cables. Not hackers: diplomats. Hackers bore easily, and they won’t be able to stand the discourse of intelligent trained professionals discussing real-life foreign affairs. American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn’t. Now, they’ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago. And, of course, every intelligence agency and every diplomat from every non-American agency on Earth is gonna fire up computers and pore over those things. To see what American diplomacy really thought about them, or to see if they were ignored (which is worse), and to see how the grownups ran what was basically a foreign-service news agency that the rest of us were always forbidden to see…”

NSA, via Google Earth, 10 March 2008

Sine Qua Non | Distributed Awareness
http://astrobio.net/interview/2111/bacterial-intelligence
http://miller-mccune.com/science-environment/bacteria-r-us-23628/

“Strictly by the numbers, the vast majority — estimated by many scientists at 90 percent — of the cells in what you think of as your body are actually bacteria, not human cells. In fact, most of the life on the planet is probably composed of bacteria. They have been found making a living in Cretaceous-era sediments below the bottom of the ocean and in ice-covered Antarctic lakes, inside volcanoes, miles high in the atmosphere, teeming in the oceans — and within every other life-form on Earth. In a series of recent findings, researchers describe bacteria that communicate in sophisticated ways, take concerted action, influence human physiology, alter human thinking and work together to bioengineer the environment. Emerging knowledge about bacteria suggests that the micro-biosphere is much more like a web, with information of all kinds, including genes, traveling in all directions simultaneously. Microbes also appear to take a much more active role in their own evolution than the so-called “higher” animals. If conditions are favorable, a population of bacteria can double every 20 minutes or so. The primary method most bacteria use is called “conjugation,” a process in which genetic material is transferred between two bacteria that are in contact. It’s as close as they come to sex (although, as far as we know, lacking the romance; it’s more like downloading apps from a website). In principle, every bacterium can exchange genes with every other bacterium on the planet. A side effect of this reality: The notion of separate bacterial species is somewhat shaky, although the term is still in use for lack of a better alternative. Group behavior has now been demonstrated so widely that many microbiologists view bacteria as multicellular organisms, much of whose activity — from gene swapping to swarming to biofilm construction — is mediated by a wide variety of chemical communications. Bacteria use chemicals to talk to each other and to nonbacterial cells as well. In other words, they have “social intelligence.”

In 2007, the NIH began an ambitious program called the Human Microbiome Project, which aims to take a census of all the microorganisms that normally live in and on the human body. Most of these live in the digestive tract, but researchers have also discovered unique populations adapted to the inside of the elbow and the back of the knee. Even the left and right hands have their own distinct biota, and the microbiomes of men and women differ. The import of this distribution of microorganisms is unclear, but its existence reinforces the notion that humans should start thinking of themselves as ecosystems, rather than discrete individuals. Recent research has shown that gut microbes control or influence nutrient supply to the human host, the development of mature intestinal cells and blood vessels, the stimulation and maturation of the immune system, and blood levels of lipids such as cholesterol. They are, therefore, intimately involved in the bodily functions that tend to be out of kilter in modern society: metabolism, cardiovascular processes and defense against disease. Many researchers are coming to view such diseases as manifestations of imbalance in the ecology of the microbes inhabiting the human body. If further evidence bears this out, medicine is about to undergo a profound paradigm shift, and medical treatment could regularly involve kindness to microbes. In a surgical patient being fed by an IV drip, the gut bacteria perceive their sustenance disappearing. A decline in available nutrients alarms them. And surgery triggers the release of stress compounds that bacteria also sense, Alverdy says. Chemotherapy and radiation have similar effects. When threatened, bacteria become defensive, often producing toxins that make the host even sicker. They also tend to speed up their acquisition of and purging of genes when under external selection pressure, of which antibiotics are an obvious and powerful example. Alverdy is finding success in treating patients with a strategy he calls “ecologic neutrality.” In research reported in the August 2008 Surgery, he was able to prevent P. aeruginosa from turning virulent in surgically stressed mice by dosing them with polyethylene glycol, which supplies the bacteria with phosphate, one of their primary needs. “Once they sense there’s plenty of phosphate,” he says, “they figure everybody must be happy here.” The treated mice in his experiments, unlike the controls, did not contract fatal infections. Researchers have found several reasons to believe that bacteria affect the mental health of humans. For one thing, bacteria produce some of the same types of neurotransmitters that regulate the function of the human brain. The human intestine contains a network of neurons, and the gut network routinely communicates with the brain. Gut bacteria affect that communication. “The bugs are talking to each other, and they’re talking to their host, and their host talks back,” Young says. The phrase “gut feeling” is probably, literally true. Even more intriguingly, there have long been hints that some bacteria, including Bifidobacteria commonly found in yogurt, can improve mood. A common soil microbe, Mycobacterium vaccae, has recently been found to cheer up lab mice in experiments by Christopher Lowry.

Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring’s vivid colours are the result of pigmented bacteria; the colours range from green to red, depending on the amount of chlorophyll the bacteria has, as well as the temperature of the water.

Beyond the universe of bacterial genes recently discovered in the human gut, surveys of marine microbes are producing similarly staggering numbers of genes and species. This spring, J. Craig Venter and co-authors reported that samples of seawater taken near Bermuda yielded 150 new types of bacteria and more than a million previously unknown genes — this in an area of open ocean thought to be low in nutrients and sparsely populated by microorganisms. R. John Parkes studies microbes found in core samples collected by the Ocean Drilling Program from rocks deep below the ocean floor. “For a long time, these deep sediments were thought to be devoid of any life at all,” he says. There’s life down there, all right, but talk about slow metabolism: When Parke analyzed 4.7 million-year-old organic sediment in the Mediterranean, he estimated the average time it took for resident microbes to reproduce by cell division at 120,000 years. And he reported finding living bacteria just over a mile below the seafloor, in sediments 111 million years old and at temperatures of 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit. But wherever they live, bacteria can take most of the credit for bringing planetary geology into the service of life. They started working on these processes promptly upon their first emergence, perhaps as early as a mere billion years into Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. Both the energy-releasing chemical reactions and the assembly of complex organic molecules necessary for life are “an emergent property of microbial life on a planetary scale.” In fact, Falkowski wrote, the genes that enable these processes today “may have been distributed across a common global gene pool, before cellular differentiation and vertical genetic transmission evolved as we know it today.” In other words, bacteria are supreme code monkeys that probably perfected the packages of genes and the regulation necessary to produce just about every form of life, trading genetic information among themselves long before there was anything resembling a eukaryotic cell, let alone the masters of the universe that humans believe humans to be. “They don’t waste things. They’re very efficient, very clever. They keep it simple but very elegant and sophisticated.” Giovannoni stops short of claiming that bacteria are actually thinking. But the litany of bacterial talents does nibble at conventional assumptions about thinking: Bacteria can distinguish “self” from “other,” and between their relatives and strangers; they can sense how big a space they’re in; they can move as a unit; they can produce a wide variety of signaling compounds, including at least one human neurotransmitter; they can also engage in numerous mutually beneficial relationships with their host’s cells. Even more impressive, some bacteria, such as Myxococcus xanthus, practice predation in packs, swarming as a group over prey microbes such as E. coli and dissolving their cell walls.

Marc van Duijn and colleagues point out that the presence of “the basic processes of cognition, such as perception, memory and action” in bacteria can now be “plausibly defended.” And bacteria that have antibiotic-resistance genes advertise the fact, attracting other bacteria shopping for those genes; the latter then emit pheromones to signal their willingness to close the deal. These phenomena, Herbert Levine’s group argues, reveal a capacity for language long considered unique to humans. But this raises the question: Is some nonhuman software organizing the teamwork of all those nonhuman semi-smart robots, aka bacteria? For this would be the truly radical argument: that bacteria — demonstrably integrated deeply and broadly into the entire planet, shaping its geochemistry, creating substrates and chemical processes that support the development of complex organic molecules, regulating the cycling of energy and nutrients both in “higher” organisms and their environments — constitute a kind of distributed awareness encompassing the whole planet. That not only are bacteria in a given local environment busy texting each other like mad, but the entire planet may consist of a giant Microbial World Wide Web. In a more down-to-earth assessment, it is clear that bacteria are not what the general run of humans thought they were, and neither are humans. Bacteria are the sine qua non for life, and the architects of the complexity humans claim for a throne. The grand story of human exceptionalism — the idea that humans are separate from and superior to everything else in the biosphere — has taken a terminal blow from the new knowledge about bacteria. Whether humanity decides to sanctify them in some way or merely admire them and learn what they’re really doing, there’s no going back. And if there’s any hope of rebalancing the chemistry of a biosphere deranged in two short centuries by humans, it very likely lies in peaceful coexistence with the seemingly brilliant, deceptively simple life-forms comprising the domain Bacteria.”

Photo taken by Camille Flammarion in 1902 of lightning striking the Eiffel Tower on a summer night.

Positively Charged Humidity
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20014798-54.html
“Nikola Tesla would be jealous. A group of chemists from Brazil have presented research claiming they’ve figured out how electricity is formed and released in the atmosphere. Based on this knowledge, the team said it believes a device could be developed for extracting electrical charges from the atmosphere and using it for electricity. They found that silica becomes more negatively charged when high levels of water vapor are present in the air, in other words during high humidity. They also found that aluminum phosphate becomes more positively charged in high humidity. “This was clear evidence that water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges and transfer them to other materials it comes into contact with. We are calling this ‘hygroelectricity,’ meaning ‘humidity electricity,’” Galembeck said in a statement. But the discovery, if true, goes against the commonly held theory among scientists that water is electroneutral–that it cannot store a charge. Galembeck does not dispute the principle of electroneutrality in theory, but believes real-life substances like water have ion imbalances that can allow it to produce a charge.”

Steam Shocks
http://scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=harness-lightning-for-energy-thanks-2010-08-26
“My colleagues and I found that common metals—aluminum, stainless steel and others—acquire charge when they are electrically isolated and exposed to humid air,” he says. “This is an extension to previously published results showing that insulators acquire charge under humid air. Thus, air is a charge reservoir.” The finding would seem to confirm anecdotes from the 19th century of workers literally shocked—rather than scalded—by steam. And it might explain how enough charge builds up for lightning, Galembeck argues. The scientists envision devices to harness this charge out of thick (with water vapor) air—a metal piece, like a lightning rod, connected to one pole of a capacitor, a device for separating and storing electric charge. The other pole of the capacitor is grounded. Expose the metal to high humidity (perhaps within a shielded box) and harvest voltage.”

Ion Imbalances
http://newscientist.com/article/dn19367-can-we-grab-electricity-from-muggy-air.html
“In 1840, workers in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, reported painful electric shocks when they came into close contact with steam leaking from factory boilers. Both Michael Faraday and Alessandro Volta puzzled over the mysterious phenomenon, dubbed steam electricity, but it was ultimately forgotten without being fully understood. Fernando Galembeck thinks there is a simple explanation, but it involves accepting that water can store charge – a controversial idea that violates the principle of electroneutrality. This principle – which states that the negatively and positively charged particles in an electrolyte cancel each other out – is widely accepted by chemists. His team electrically isolated chrome-plated brass tubes and then increased the humidity of the surrounding atmosphere. Once the relative humidity reached 90 per cent, the uncharged tube gained a small but detectable negative charge of 300 microcoulombs per square metre – equating to a capacity millions of times smaller than that of an AA battery. The Victorian workers would have had to have been particularly sensitive souls to complain of such a shock, but Galembeck thinks his study shows steam electricity may be a credible phenomenon. He thinks the charge builds up because of a reaction between the chrome oxide layer that forms on the surface of the tube and the water in the atmosphere. As the relative humidity rises, more water condenses onto the tube’s surface. Hydrogen ions in the water react with the chrome oxide, leading to an ion imbalance that imparts excess charge onto the isolated metal.

The work finds favour with Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington in Seattle. Last year he suggested that pure water could store charge and behave much like a battery, after finding that passing a current between two submerged electrodes created a pH gradient in the water that persisted for an hour once the current had been switched off. He says this is evidence that the water stores areas of positive and negative charge, but the experiment led to a lively debate in the pages of the journal Langmuir over whether the results really violated the principle of electroneutrality or whether there were salt impurities in the water that led it to behave like a conventional electrochemical cell.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBEwn6iWOo

Polywater Batteries
http://uwtv.org/newsletter/insider_0408.asp
“Pollack’s water studies have led to amazing possibilities: that water acts as a battery, that this battery may recharge in a way resembling photosynthesis, that these water batteries could be harnessed to produce electricity. “Some findings seemed to imply that water acted as though it was a polymer; in other words, all the molecules would somehow join together into a polymer and create some really weird kinds of effects,” Pollack described. Eventually, these results – first presented by a Russian chemist – were discredited. “The nails were driven into the coffin of water research by another debacle that took place 20 years later, and that was the idea of water memory,” Pollack said. “The idea was that water molecules could have memory of other substances into which it had been in contact. It’s a 100-year-old idea that there’s a fourth phase of water. This is not an original idea.” Though the concept of a liquid crystalline, or gel-like, phase of water has been around for some time, the generally accepted view is that this kind of water is only two or three molecular layers thick. “And what we found in our experiments is that it’s not two or three layers, but two or three million layers. In other words, it’s the dominant feature,” Pollack said. He has since discovered much about its underestimated thickness, its capacity to create a charge, its connections to photosynthesis and its practical applications. The thickness of this gel-like water may explain why items of higher density than water – such as a coin – can float. Surface tension is at work, but it arises from this thick, gel-like surface layer. “Turns out that the thickness depends on the pH,” Pollack said. “If you increase the pH, we found that this region gets thicker. It also gets thicker with time.

Dr. Pollack works in his lab to demonstrate some of the unusual properties of water. “This kind of water is negative, and the water beyond is positive. Negative, positive – you have a battery,” Pollack explained. “The question is, how is it used and might we capitalize on this kind of battery?” The key to understanding how this water battery works is learning how it is recharged. “You can’t just get something for nothing – there has to be energy that charges it,” Pollack said. “This puzzled us for several years, and finally we found the answer: it’s light. It was a real surprise. So if you take one of these surfaces next to water, and you see the battery right next to it, and you shine light on it, the battery gets stronger. It’s a very powerful effect.””

Deliberate Extinction
http://latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-seed-bank-ruling-20100812,0,7445908.story
“A Russian seed bank preserving more than 5,000 rare fruits, including unique varieties of strawberries, plums, pears, apples and currants, moved one step closer to demolition after losing a court hearing Wednesday, in which rights to the federally-owned land were granted to a government housing development agency. The Vavilov Research Institute, which manages the bank as well as 11 other crop development and conservation facilities across Russia, immediately filed an appeal. Another hearing will follow in about a month, at which point the land’s future will be finalized. It is unlikely, however, that the ruling will be changed, said Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Even Sergey Alexanian, deputy director of foreign relations at the Vavilov Institute, acknowledged that the Russian Housing Development Foundation is legally in the right. The seed bank’s final hope is to win the support of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who have the power to overrule the court’s decision. So far, neither has responded to letters.”

Tamara Yashkina, a researcher at the Vavilov research institute that runs the seed bank outside St. Petersburg, sorts through oat seeds. {photo by Vyacheslav Yevdokimov}

Private Homes vs Global Good
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-russian-seed-bank-20100811,0,5738442.story
“The threatened plants are part of a collection of rare berries and other fruits growing at the Pavlovsk Experimental Station, a seed bank that blankets over 200 acres of prime land about 20 miles outside St. Petersburg; 90% of the bank’s plant varietals are found nowhere else. “Saving varieties is critical for breeding,” said Kent Bradford, a plant scientist at UC Davis. “When breeders are faced with a new issue, like a disease or growing in a new area, they need to go back to that diversity to see which ones are resistant or have traits that they like.” The Pavlovsk facility is one of about 1,400 such operations in the world. The best known is probably the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the remote Norwegian island of Spitzbergen in the Arctic, which keeps frozen seeds as backup for collections around the world, but that facility’s stores are far from complete. Moreover, not all plants can grow from frozen seeds — such as most of those at the Russian station. Furthermore, there is little possibility of relocating the Russian facility. An appropriate backup site isn’t available, and moving all the plants would be expensive and labor-intensive. “These are not some boxes to move to another location; these are trees,” Alexanian said. In short, if the fields are razed, the particular varietals that grow there will be gone forever. “There’s no backup for this collection, and that’s the real tragedy of it all,” said Cary Fowler. “This is extinction on a scale that I’ve not seen in my professional lifetime, and it can’t be replaced.”

Oldest Global Seed Bank
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/08/pavlovsk-seed-bank-russia
“In what appears Kafkaesque logic, the property developers argue that because the station contains a “priceless collection”, no monetary value can be assigned to it and so it is worthless. In another nod to Kafka, the government’s federal fund of residential real estate development has argued that the collection was never registered and thus does not officially exist. “It is a bitter irony that the single most deliberately destructive act against crop diversity could be about to happen in the country that invented the modern seed bank,” said Cary Fowler. “Russia taught the world about the importance of crop collections for the future of agriculture. A decision to destroy Pavlovsk would forever tarnish a cause that generations of Russian plant scientists have lived and, quite literally, died, to protect.” The station was established in 1926 by Nikolai Vavilov, the man credited with creating the idea of seed banks as repositories of plant diversity that could be used to breed new varieties in response to threats to food production. During the siege of Leningrad, 12 scientists chose to starve to death while protecting the diversity amassed by Vavilov, even though the seeds of rice, peas, corn and wheat that they were protecting could have sustained them.”

Nikolai Vavilov
http://vir.nw.ru/history/vav_sp.htm
http://vir.nw.ru/history/vavilov.htm
“Vavilov is recognized as the foremost plant geographer of contemporary times. To explore the major agricultural centers in this country and abroad, Vavilov organized and took part in over 100 collecting missions. Vavilov, the symbol of glory of the national science, is at the same time the symbol of its tragedy. As early as in the beginning of the 1930′s his scientific programs were being deprived of governmental support. In the stifling atmosphere of a totalitarian state, the institute headed by Vavilov turned into a resistance point to the pseudo-scientific concepts of Trofim D.Lysenco. As a result of this controversy, Vavilov was arrested in August 1940, and his closest associates were also sacked and imprisoned. He died in the Saratov prison of dystrophia on 26 January 1943 and was buried in a common prison grave. Nevertheless, the memory of Vavilov has been preserved by his followers. During that tragic period they kept on gathering Vavilov’s manuscripts, documents and pictures. Since mid-50′s, after the official rehabilitation of Vavilov, hundreds of books and articles devoted to his life and scientific accomplishments have been published. The name of Vavilov is now born by the Russian Society of Geneticists and Breeders, the Institute of General Genetics of the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Plant Industry, and the Saratov Agricultural Institute.”

One of the 893 blackcurrant varieties in the threatened collection.

Dear Mr. President
http://croptrust.org/main/index.php?itemid=773
http://eng.letters.kremlin.ru/
http://change.org/croptrust/petitions/view/tell_the_president_of_russia_to_stop_the_destruction_of_the_future_of_food
Medvedev’s New Twitter Account : “@KremlinRussia_E Mr. President, please protect #Pavlovsk Station”

Only 150 Plants in Cultivation (Down from 7000)
http://cchronicle.com/2009/11/from-india-six-lessons/
http://fao.org/DOCREP/004/V1430E/V1430E04.htm
http://nytimes.com/2005/08/17/world/europe/17iht-food.html
“Historically, humans utilized more than 7,000 plant species to meet their basic food needs. Today, due to the limitations of modern large-scale, mechanized farming, only 150 plant species are under cultivation, and the majority of humans live on only 12 plant species, according to research by the Food and Agriculture Organization. In the last century, dozens of varieties of corn, wheat and potato have disappeared. “This is not nearly as sexy as a panda going extinct, but the losses are far more dangerous for our survival,” Esquinas said. The consequences are potentially dire: Of the nearly 8,000 varieties of apple that grew in the United States at the turn of the century, more than 95 percent no longer exist. In Mexico, only 20 percent of the corn types recorded in 1930 can now be found. Only 10 percent of the 10,000 wheat varieties grown in China in 1949 remain in use.”

display showing grains, honey, vegetables and fruits produced by Indian farmers in a region where traditional crop diversity is still intact

Previously on Spectre : Guarded by Polar Bears, For Now
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/06/20/guarded-by-polar-bears-for-now/

$8K Personal Satellite Kit
http://news.discovery.com/space/personal-satellite-kit.html
“Bringing the do-it-yourself market to a whole new level, a California firm is selling kits to build a personal satellite — and get it into space — for $8,000. The program, called TubeSat, is the brainchild of Randa and Roderick Milliron, a Mojave, Calif.-based couple who’ve been developing a bare-bones, low-cost rocket system for the past 14 years. Selling flights as a package deal with satellite-building kits is proving to be a winning combination, with more than a dozen customers signed up to fly on the debut launch early next year. The first of four suborbital test flights is scheduled for August and there are customers for those as well. The kit contains the shell components for a satellite including a printed circuit board, solar cells, batteries, a combination transmitter-receiver, microcomputer, electronic components, blueprints and a structural shell that’s about the size of a one-liter bottle. Most TubeSat customers, so far, are universities. “There’s been a massive number of shelved experiments,” Milliron said, caused by a dearth of low-cost launch systems. “This is an opportunity for the academic community to fly affordably.” Interorbital’s rocket, called the Neptune, will place up to 32 TubeSats and 10 slightly larger off-the-shelf spacecraft called CubeSats into orbit about 192 miles above Earth. At that altitude, the spacecraft will orbit for about six weeks, then burn up in the atmosphere. Launches will take place from the island of ‘Eua, located in the Kingdom of Tonga, in the South Pacific.”

Includes Free Launch (32 at a Time)
http://interorbital.com/Company%20Page_1.htm
http://interorbital.com/TubeSat_1.htm
“A TubeSat is designed to function as a Basic Satellite Bus or as a simple stand-alone satellite. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite’s structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held HAM radio receiver. The TubeSat also allows the builder to add his or her own experiment or function to the basic TubeSat kit. As long as the experiment or function satisfies the volume and mass restrictions, it can be integrated into the TubeSat. These restrictions provide a unique intellectual challenge for the experiment or function designer. TubeSats are also available as Double TubeSats, Triple TubeSats, or Quadruple TubeSats. Prior to launch, each TubeSat is inserted into one of the rocket’s 32 Satellite Ejection Cylinders. They never come into contact with the other TubeSats. Once on-orbit, the satellites are released according to a pre-programmed timing sequence. The timing sequence is designed to prevent satellite clustering. Interorbital expects to launch a set of 32 TubeSats per month. If the buyer pays the full cost of the TubeSat kit upfront, he or she is immediately placed on a launch manifest according to the order in which the payment was received. TubeSat buyers also have the option of paying half of the cost upfront, then paying the other half of the cost at a later date or when the TubeSat is completed and ready for integration into the launch vehicle. With this option, the builder will be placed on a launch manifest according to the time when full payment is received.”

See Also: CubeSats
http://cubesatkit.com/content/overview.html
http://cubesat.calpoly.edu/index.php/collaborate/suppliers
http://space.com/businesstechnology/cube_sats_040908.html
“A standard CubeSat is a motherboard of invention: About a 4-inch (10-centimeter) block of equipment that tips the scale at roughly 2 pounds (1 kilogram). A handful are already in space and with other launches planned for later this year. Peep inside a CubeSat and you’ll spot off-the-shelf circuitry in the familiar form of microprocessors and modem ports, and other microchip devices typically used in cell phones, digital cameras and hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite navigation units. A CubeSat can be built for under $25,000, although they typically come in at the $30,000 to $40,000 price range – still a bargain. The “going-rate” per CubeSat launch is in the $40,000 range. Universities have an inherent advantage in developing “disruptive” space systems, Swartwout contends, and that is the freedom to fail. In fact, he added, three of the six CubeSats placed in orbit in 2003 were either never contacted or failed very early. “Experimental failure is a basic element of university life, and from the university’s perspective, a failed spacecraft is not necessarily a failed mission,” Swartwout said. Swartwout explained that the tremendous reductions in the size and cost of electronics are making possible “disposable” probes that function for only weeks, but whose very low cost and short development cycle make their launch and operation affordable. There is talk about flying tethers on the spacecraft, as well as toting along inflatable packages – both techniques viewed as a way to hasten a CubeSat’s reentry and lessen worry about adding to already orbiting space clutter. CubeSat innovators also envision the small spacecraft deployed from the International Space Station – chucked out of an airlock. Then there is the prospect of CubeSats toting biological or hardware experiments that reenter and parachute to Earth. “I hope the CubeSat is like the personal computer…you don’t know what the heck you’re going to do with this little box when you build it or what markets will be enabled. But it’s so cool, you’ve got to do it,” Twiggs concluded.”

Open Source Arduino Sats
http://opensat.cc/download/DIYSatellite_en.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=YAIHa97G4icC

Cellphone + Toy Parts
http://wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/cell-phone-satellite/
“Instead of investing in their own computer research and development, engineers at the NASA Ames Research Center are looking to cellphones and off-the-shelf toys to power the future of low-cost satellite technology. The smartphone in your pocket has about 120 times more computing power than the average satellite, which has the equivalent of a 1984-era computer inside. “You can go to Walmart and buy toys that work better than satellites did 20 years ago,” said NASA physicist Chris Boshuizen. The biggest challenge of sending cellphones and toys into space is whether the parts can get up there without shaking apart and work in a vacuum at extreme high and low temperatures. To do some preliminary testing, two Nexus One cellphones caught rides on two rockets on July 24 that launched 30,000 feet into the atmosphere at a maximum speed of mach 2.4 (about 1,800 miles per hour). One of the rockets crashed into the ground after its parachute failed, but the other made it back with the cellphone unscathed. Both cellphones were able to record the acceleration of the rocket using their built-in accelerometers, and the undamaged phone captured 2.5 hours of video of the event through a hole in the side of the rocket. “Everything that didn’t break is a piece of data,” said volunteer engineer Ben Howard. “We know that the batteries didn’t break and that the computer worked the whole time.” If the cellphones ultimately get used to power satellites, they will probably be sent up without a screen and with a different battery to make them lighter. Next, the team will build a stabilizing mechanism for the satellite using the cellphone, $100 toy gyroscopes and parts similar to those of the Mindstorms Lego, so the satellite can orient itself in space. By installing three spinning gyroscopes and getting them to spin at different velocities, a satellite can move in any direction. The same technique is currently used on many satellites, but requires multimillion dollar technology. The whole goal of the project is to make satellites cheap and affordable, so that anyone with bit of time and a couple of thousand dollars can send their own satellite into space. Upgrading the computing power of satellites using cellphones would mean increased satellite capabilities, possibly including artificial intelligence. “We’re not sure yet exactly what people will want to do with their satellites, and that’s the point,” said NASA education specialist Matt Reyes. “What can you imagine doing with your phone in space?””

Retrieving the Nexus One cell phone from the rocket post-launch

Previously on Spectre : Sat Hacks
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/sat-hacks/
Consumer Satellite Use
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/consumer-satellite-use/
Russians Launching Satellites From Subs
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/russians-launching-satellites-from-subs/
Brazilian Satellite Squatters
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/brazilian-satellite-squatters/
Earth Will Have Rings
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/earth-will-have-rings/

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/post-quake-architecture/

What’s Lying Around
http://earthship.com/haiti-disaster-relief.html
http://earthship.com/aboutus

Earthship n. 1. passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials 2. thermal mass construction for temperature stabilization. 3. renewable energy & integrated water systems make the Earthship an off-grid home with little to no utility bills.

Biotecture n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.

Tires + Bottles + Dirt = House
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2010/07/20/solving-haitis-housing-problem-with-old-tires-bottles/

“Made from used tires, discarded bottles, cardboard, Styrofoam and other waste materials, Mr. Reynolds designs and builds these homes to be essentially energy self-sufficient. Earlier this month, Mr. Reynolds and two builders went to Haiti intending to survey the area to see how they could help. “There was nothing but tents, nothing but cleanup,” Mr. Reynolds says of what he saw in Port-au-Prince. Instead of just surveying the city, Mr. Reynolds and his team ended up building. A non-governmental organization called Grassroots United had gotten Haitian children to collect tires and plastic bottles from the tent camps. Mr. Reynolds himself had one arm in a cast because of rotator cuff surgery, and the two builders with him both got sick from the water and heat. “The three of us were worthless, pretty much,” he says. But 40 locals, ranging in age from four to 50, built an earthship in just four days under his guidance. “They had nothing to do. They were all eager to learn, and it turns out all the skills we could do, they could do.” The earthship, just 120 square feet, is made of 120 tires packed with dirt – such tires are the main building blocks of any earthship. Designed to be earthquake- and hurricane-resistant, the Haiti earthship is not completely finished. Mr. Reynolds plans to return in October to add plaster to the exterior and a screened-in veranda with flush toilets, as well as outfit it for solar energy and water collection. He hopes the home will be used as a prototype for more in Haiti, an example of what’s possible. Earthships could be a boon for a place like Haiti, says Mr. Reynolds, where even the capital city has little infrastructure like sewage or electricity. “The most substantial thing I saw down there was a plywood shack,” he says. When he returns to Haiti in October, he plans to find a site where he can build a small village of earthships. “It doesn’t have to be in the city because there is nothing in the city anyway,” he says of the lack of infrastructure. “These buildings would provide their own power, their own water, their own sewage (systems).” Most important, Mr. Reynolds says, is a sense of empowerment instilled in those who helped. “They built the building!” he says. “The real thing that shows it’s possible for them to do it is that they did it.””

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX0cXnUYXC8

See Also : Post-Tsunami
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124510435308816591.html

Q: Where did you get the idea to use trash?
A: Walter Cronkite did a piece on clear-cutting timber in the Northwest. Even in 1969, he predicted massive deforestation would result in wood scarcity and would affect our oxygen levels, things that have become big issues today. Charles Kuralt did another piece on beer cans being thrown all over the streets and highways. So I started playing with beer cans and trying to make them into building blocks. It was a way to kill two birds with one stone. I later decided to try a different material and thought of the mountains of discarded tires that can be found everywhere. Pack them with dirt and they will store energy. Plus they’re strong and resilient, so I built an entire house out of them. I went on to add photovoltaic panels, windmills, water collection and onsite sewage treatment.

Q: And you went overseas with your ideas?
A: For a while… I went wherever there was a desire to use my ideas. After the earthquake and tsunami in 2004, an architect [from the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean] that lived right in the middle of the disaster saw our Web site and asked us to come. Their whole community was just wiped out. We paid the local kids to bring us bottles, and we built a house out of them that collects its own water. We gave the plans to the engineers.

Non-Biodegradables as Building Materials
http://earthship.com/materials/the-offgassing-non-issue-tires-are-hazardous-in-piles-not-earthships
http://earthship.com/materials/green-building-construction-materials

“A sustainable home must make use of indigenous materials, those occurring naturally in the local area. For thousands and thousands of years, housing was built from found materials such as rock, earth, reeds and logs. Today, there are mountains of by-products of our civilization that are already made and delivered to all areas. These are the natural resources of the modern humanity. These materials and the techniques for using them must be accessible to the common person in terms of price and skill required to use them. The less energy required to turn a found object into a usable building material the better. This concept is also called embodied-energy.

The Primary Building Block: Rammed-Earth encased in Steel Belted Rubber: The major structural building component of the Earthship is recycled automobile tires filled with compacted earth to form a rammed earth brick encased in steel belted rubber. This brick and the resulting bearing walls it forms is virtually indestructible.

Aluminum Cans and Glass/Plastic Bottles: These ‘little bricks’ are a great, simple way to build interior, non-structural walls. Aluminum can walls actually make very strong walls. The ‘little bricks’ create a cement-matrix that is very strong and very easy to build. Bottle can create beautiful colored walls that light shines through.

Resilient: Earthquakes are an issue in many parts of the world. Any method of building must relate to this potential threat. Since earthquakes involve a horizontal movement or shaking of the structure, this suggests a material with resilience or capacity to move with this shaking. Brittle materials like concrete, break, crack and fracture. The ideal structural material for dealing with this kind of situation would have a ‘rubbery’ or resilient quality to it. This kind of material would allow movement without failure.

Low specific skill requirements: If the materials for easily obtainable housing are to be truly accessibly to the common person they must, by their very nature, be easy to learn how to assemble. The nature of the materials for building an earthship must allow for assembling skills to be learned and mastered in a matter of hours, not year. These skills must be basic enough that specific talent is not required to learn them.”

concentrations of algal blooms that contribute to dead zones / photo: NASA

as in : ‘How Big is the Dead Zone this Year?’
http://reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65L6IA20100622
http://bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2010/06/28/daily24.html
“The 2010 forecast released by NOAA predicts that the dead zone could measure between 6,500 and 7,800 square miles, equivalent to the size of Lake Ontario. The Gulf dead zone forms each spring and summer off the Louisiana and Texas coasts when oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters. Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste is the main source of the nitrogen and phosphorus that fuel the growth of algae blooms, that in turn create the dead zone. The five largest Gulf dead zones on record have occurred since 2001. The biggest occurred in 2002 and measured 8,484 square miles. The official size of the 2010 Gulf dead zone will be announced following a NOAA-supported monitoring survey led by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium being held from July 24 through Aug. 2.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cj0JK_sipg

Hypoxia
http://ncddc.noaa.gov/activities/gulf-hypoxia-stakeholders
http://livescience.com/environment/080814-oceans-oxygen.html
“A review of research into these so-called “dead zones,” in the journal Science, finds that the number of dead zones has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960′s. The study authors tallied 405 dead zones in coastal waters worldwide today, affecting about 95,000 square miles (245,000 square kilometers) of ocean.”

Massive Methane Bubble Caused Explosion
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/08/deepwater-horizon-blast-methane-bubble
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/30/biologists-find-oil-spill-deadzones
“A report into last month’s blast said the gas escaped from the oil well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding. Now scientists are confronting growing evidence that BP’s ruptured well is expanding oxygen-depleted “dead zones” where fish and other marine life cannot survive. In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as “astonishingly high” levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels. The finding presents a new challenge to scientists who so far have been focused on studying the effects on the Gulf of crude oil, and the 5.7m litres of chemical dispersants used to break up the slick. Such high concentrations, it is feared, would trigger the growth of microbes, which break up the methane, but also gobble up oxygen needed by marine life to survive, driving out other living things. Joye said the methane was settling in a 200-metre layer of the water column, between depths of 1,000 to 1,300 metres in concentrations that were already threatening oxygen levels. A Texas A&M University oceanographer issued a similar warning last week on his return from a 10-day research voyage in the Gulf. John Kessler recorded “astonishingly high” methane levels in surface and deep water within a five-mile radius of the ruptured well. His team also recorded 30% depletion of oxygen in some locations.”

Pollution vs Pollution : Add More Fertilizer?
http://newscientist.com/article/dn18971-bacteria-help-to-clean-up-deepwater-horizon-spill.html
“Over the past few years, researchers have found that dozens of different kinds of marine bacteria have a healthy appetite for oil. Water samples from the Gulf of Mexico are showing signs that marine bacteria are already pitching in to help with clean-up efforts, and that populations of these bacteria in this area are likely to boom as they feast on the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Crucially, R/V Pelican happened to be in the area when Deepwater Horizon blew up. That means the team could immediately collect water samples to test for bacterial populations from areas that were threatened by the spill but had not yet been contaminated. “Now we plan to see how the microbial community evolves when you give it oil,” says Grimes. He hopes to screen bacteria from oil-affected water for the DNA of oil-eating enzymes, and use this to determine their species. In previous research he found that Vibrio became the dominant type of marine bacteria off the south-eastern US as oil tanker traffic increased after the 1970s. Atlas, who managed the “bioremediation” of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, says the bacterial process will be helped if fertilizer is added to the water, as then the oil-eaters will have the nitrogen and phosphate they need to grow. Fertilizer has already been used to aid the bacterial breakdown of oil that has hit the shore, but it could also help bacteria in the open sea if it is added to the detergents that are being used to disperse the oil. The fertilizer lodges in the surface of the oil droplets created by the detergents, he says – right where the bacteria can use them.”

Chemosynthetic Community Locations in the Gulf of Mexico

Oil Eaters (This Has Come Up Before)
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/regulate/environ/chemo/chemo.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/06/22/science/20100622cold.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/science/22cool.html
“The deep seabed was once considered a biological desert. Life, the logic went, was synonymous with light and photosynthesis. The sun powered the planet’s food chains, and only a few scavengers could ply the preternaturally dark abyss. Then, in 1977, oceanographers working in the deep Pacific stumbled on bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and big tube worms — a cornucopia of abyssal life built on microbes that thrived in hot, mineral-rich waters welling up from volcanic cracks, feeding on the chemicals that leached into the seawater and serving as the basis for whole chains of life that got along just fine without sunlight. In 1984, scientists found that the heat was not necessary. In exploring the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, they discovered sunless habitats powered by a new form of nourishment. The microbes that founded the food chain lived not on hot minerals but on cold petrochemicals seeping up from the icy seabed. Today, scientists have identified roughly one hundred sites in the gulf where cold-seep communities of clams, mussels and tube worms flourish in the sunless depths. And they have accumulated evidence of many more — hundreds by some estimates, thousands by others — most especially in the gulf’s deep, unexplored waters. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were 2,000 communities, from suburbs to cities,” said Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who studies the dark ecosystems. The world’s richest known concentration of these remarkable communities is in the Gulf of Mexico. The life forms include tube worms up to eight feet long. Some of the creatures appear old enough, scientists say, to predate the arrival of Columbus in the New World. Now, by horrific accident, these cold communities have become the subject of a quiet debate among scientists. The gulf is, of course, the site of the giant oil spill that began April 20 with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig. The question is what the oil pouring into the gulf means for these deep, dark habitats, in contrast to the slow, diffuse, chronic seepage of petrochemicals across much of the gulf’s northern slope. Many factors, like the density of oil in undersea plumes, the size of resulting oxygen drops and the potential toxicity of oil dispersants — all unknowns — could grow into threats that outweigh any possible benefits and damage or even destroy the dark ecosystems.”

Charter Cities
http://chartercities.org/concept
http://newsweek.com/blogs/wealth-of-nations/2009/08/12/the-best-development-plan-in-the-world-originated-with-the-british-empire.html
“The secret to turning a poor nation into a rich one can’t be found in a World Bank report. It wasn’t hatched in the corridors of the International Monetary Fund, either. It came from the British Empire. That is one way, at least, of interpreting Stanford economist Paul Romer’s new plan for turning economically backward countries like Cuba into engines of growth like China. Experts have long known that the traditional tools of development don’t work: free trade, foreign investment, and charity have failed as many countries as they’ve helped. The rot in a dysfunctional country is at its core—in the laws, institutions, and informal rules that govern daily life. How to fix a problem so fundamental? Let a rich country take over part of a poor one. The hope, says Romer, is that the superior norms of the developed country will take root abroad. One problem, admits Romer, is the parallel between charter cities and colonialism. Great Britain, for instance, would surely have qualms about taking over a few hundred acres of coastline in Ghana, where the legacy of slavery is still deeply felt. Romer says the similarities are surface level only—there’s no coercion involved in a charter city since it would be founded on empty or near-empty land, and anyone who lives there would do so by choice. Charter cities would only be considered in countries that welcome them. But the colonial parallel would certainly still rankle some. One way to mitigate the PR problem would be to let a group of rich countries administer the charter area; that way, no single nation could be accused of exploiting the host.”

Adopt-A-City
http://video.forbes.com/fvn/21-century-cities-09/adopt-a-city
http://theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134/
“Halfway through the 12th Century, and a long time before economists began pondering how to turn poor places into rich ones, the Germanic prince Henry the Lion set out to create a merchant’s mecca on the lawless Baltic coast. He seized control of a fledgling town called Lübeck, had Niclot beheaded on the battlefield, and arranged for Lübeck to become the seat of a diocese. A grand rectangular market was laid out at the center of the town; all that was missing was the merchants. To attract that missing ingredient to his city, Henry hit on an idea that has enjoyed a sort of comeback lately. He devised a charter for Lübeck, a set of “most honorable civic rights,” calculating that a city with light regulation and fair laws would attract investment easily. The stultifying feudal hierarchy was cast aside; an autonomous council of local burgesses would govern Lübeck. Onerous taxes and trade restrictions were ruled out; merchants who settled in Lübeck would be exempt from duties and customs throughout Henry the Lion’s lands, which stretched south as far as Bavaria. The residents of Lübeck were promised fair treatment before the law and an independent mint that would shelter them from confiscatory inflation. With this bill of rights in place, Henry dispatched messengers to Russia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Merchants who liked the sound of his charter were invited to migrate to Lübeck. The plan worked. Immigrants soon began arriving in force, and Lübeck became the leading entrepôt for the budding Baltic Sea trade route, which eventually extended as far west as London and Bruges and as far east as Novgorod, in Russia. Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than Lübeck’s wealth was the influence of its charter. As trade routes lengthened, new cities mushroomed all along the Baltic shore, and rather than develop a legal code from scratch, the next wave of city fathers copied Lübeck’s charter, importing its political and economic liberties. The early imitators included the nearby cities of Rostock and Danzig, but the charter was eventually adopted as far afield as Riga and Tallinn, the capitals of modern Latvia and Estonia. The medieval world had stumbled upon a formula for creating order out of chaos and prosperity amid backwardness. Lübeck ultimately became the seat of the Hanseatic League, an economic alliance of 200 cities that lasted nearly half a millennium.”

Laboratories for Innovation
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/can-charter-cities-change-the-world-a-qa-with-paul-romer/
Q. Let’s move to logistics. Who might grant the charter for one of these cities and see that it will be enforced?
A. Different charters could specify different arrangements. This means that we could try many new types of innovative structures. If a national government has sufficient credibility, it could start a charter city within its own territory and administer it from the national capital. This is, in effect, what some countries have done when they have created special economic zones with rules that are different from the ones that prevail in the rest of the country. You could imagine that a country like India might try something like this to speed up urbanization by cutting through many local rules that get in the way of urban development. In poorer countries that don’t have the same kind of credibility with international investors, a more interesting but controversial possibility is that two or more countries might sign a treaty specifying the charter for a new city and allocate between them responsibilities for administering different parts of the treaty. Let me give you a specific example. Right now, the United States and Cuba have a treaty that gives the United States administrative control in perpetuity over a piece of sovereign Cuban territory, Guantanamo Bay. I’ve suggested that Canada and Cuba sign a new treaty in which Canada would take over administration of this area, bring Canadian rule of law there, and let a city grow up that could bring to Cuba some of the advantages that Hong Kong brought to China.

Q. It all sounds great as a theoretical exercise, but honestly, don’t your colleagues tell you that something like this will never happen?
A. They do say this, which is actually kind of ironic when you line it up with the other things they say. They recognize that the construct of a charter city is something that could make everyone better off. They admit that there is no technological or economic constraint that keeps us from building many of these. Then they say that for political reasons, it will never happen. They tell me that you can’t change politics; you can’t overcome nationalism; there is no way for countries to work together to extend the reach of good rules. Then these same economists suggest that we should just stick to business as usual. We should offer conventional economic advice and assume that political systems will naturally follow our advice when we point to something that could make everyone better off. But of course, they have already revealed that they don’t believe this. What’s going on here is a kind of self-censoring. Economists seem to think that we should propose things that are acceptable and that political systems will pursue, but that we should avoid proposing or even discussing things that are controversial or politically incorrect. I think we’d do our jobs better if we just said what’s true without trying to be amateur politicians.

students do homework under the parking lot lights at G’bessi Airport in Guinea

How to Calculate Your Resource Wealth
http://apfc.org/home/Content/dividend/dividend.cfm
http://pfd.alaska.gov/faqs/index.aspx
http://iraqdividend.com/alaska_dividend/
“The Alaska dividend, which Hammond helped create while governor, is “an existing basic income guarantee in the world today. Without a permanent fund dividend program,” Hammond said. “Alaska will face the same fate as Nigeria.” There, the World Bank estimates that $296 billion flowed in and out of the government’s treasury during its oil boom, “leaving them worse off than they were before,” Hammond said. The pattern has been repeated around the globe where countries have come into an oil windfall, he said. “Iraq is but the latest example. What better way to induce a capitalistic, democratic mindset among Iraqis? Far better than a few privileged kleptocrats living in opulent splendor while others grovel in squalor,” Hammond said. In Iraq, the economist Smith recommended following Alaska’s precedent but avoiding Alaska’s mistakes, Hammond noted. Those mistakes were two-fold: Not putting all public resource wealth into the fund, and not reserving the income solely for dividends unless approved by a vote of the people. “Public resources should belong directly to the public through mechanisms such as Alaska’s permanent fund … It is a model governments all over the world would be well-advised to copy.”

or Brazil
http://widerquist.com/karl/Suplicy-Interview.htm
http://adn.com/2008/08/09/488420/pfd-rebate-pack-a-punch.html
“The Brazilian National Congress approved Law 10.835 that institutes an unconditional Citizen’s Basic Income, sanctioned by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in January 8, 2004. The law says that it will be established step-by-step, starting with those most in need, until the day when everyone in Brazil will have that right. Everyone in Brazil, including the foreigners living here for more than five years, regardless his/her social or economic condition, will receive R$ 40 per month. In a family with six members, the total will be R$ 240. With the progress of the country, this amount will be raised, we shall say to R$ 100, someday to R$ 500, R$ 1,000 and so on. It will not be denied to anybody. It will be unconditional.”

Step One : Locate Resources
http://afghanistan.cr.usgs.gov/airborne.php
http://independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghanistans-resources-could-make-it-the-richest-mining-region-on-earth-2000507.html
“The sheer size of the deposits – including copper, gold, iron and cobalt as well as vast amounts of lithium, a key component in batteries of Western lifestyle staples such as laptops and BlackBerrys – holds out the possibility that Afghanistan, ravaged by decades of conflict, might become one of the most important and lucrative centres of mining in the world. According to a Pentagon memo, Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, with one location in Ghazni province showing the potential to compete with Bolivia, which, until now, held half the known world reserves.”

Determine True Costs
http://seattlepi.com/specials/mining/26875_mine11.shtml
“Gold, silver, platinum and other precious metals for free. Land for $5 an acre or less. It’s pretty much the same deal miners have had for 129 years, ever since Congress approved the General Mining Law in 1872. Modern mining methods have left the West pockmarked by huge craters, some so large that they are visible from space. Under terms of the antiquated law, miners cart away everything from gold to kitty litter from public lands — minerals worth about $11 billion in the last eight years alone. Not only does the U.S. Treasury get nothing, Congress has granted miners a tax break worth an estimated $823 million in the coming decade. Over the years, public lands the size of Connecticut have been made private under terms of the 1872 law, all for $2.50 to $5 an acre, though not all of it has been used for mining. Like the better-known Homestead Act, which offered free land to anyone willing to farm it, the mining law was intended as an incentive to those willing to push West and settle the frontier. That frontier was closed long ago, but the mining law remains on the books and very much in use. Not all critics of the 1872 law call for reform because of environmental damage. Some are galled by the fact that the law, breaking with tradition, allows miners to dig a fortune from public land without giving a share to the American citizens who own it. In 1920, Congress removed oil, natural gas and other minerals that could be used for fuel from the 1872 Mining Law. Instead, the government would lease the rights. And in 1977, Congress decreed that miners of coal on federal land would have to pay a royalty of 8 to 12.5 percent, and clean up after themselves. The government in the past decade has collected $11.08 billion from companies taking coal, oil, and natural gas, plus $35.8 billion in rents, bonuses, royalties and escrow payments for offshore oil and gas reserves. Still, hard-rock miners pay nothing for the gold, silver, platinum, copper and other minerals they get. Walish, the manager of Cambior’s Top of the World project, joins many in the mining industry in warning, “If massive royalties are put on federal land, you’re going to see a lot less mining.”

Distribute Equally
http://nytimes.com/2003/09/10/world/struggle-for-iraq-iraq-s-wealth-popular-idea-give-oil-money-people-rather-than.html
“The notion of diverting oil wealth directly to citizens, perhaps through annual payments like Alaska’s, has become that political rarity: a wonky idea with mass appeal, from the laborers in Tayeran Square to Iraq’s leaders. American officials have projected that a properly functioning oil industry in Iraq will generate $15 billion to $20 billion a year, enough to give every Iraqi adult roughly $1,000, which is half the annual salary of a middle-class worker. ”A fund like Alaska’s is the best way to prevent one kleptocracy from succeeding another in Iraq,” Mr. Clemons said. ”It would go a long way to curbing the cynical belief that Americans want Iraqi oil for themselves, and it would give more Iraqis a stake in the success of their new country. It would be the equivalent of redistributing land to Japanese farmers after World War II, which was the single most important democratizing reform during the American occupation.” Thomas I. Palley, an economist at the Open Society Institute, proposed dividing a quarter of the oil revenue each year among all adults in Iraq. Oil companies would not be directly affected by an oil fund, since they would be paying the same taxes and fees no matter what the government did with the money. But they could benefit indirectly if citizens eager for higher payments pressed the government to increase production and open the books to outside auditors. ”The oil industry likes working in countries with dedicated oil funds and transparent accounting, because there’s less loose money to corrupt the government. Corruption is bad for business,” Mr. West said, ”because it creates instability. In places like Alaska and Norway, people support the oil industry because they see the benefits. In places like Nigeria, they see all this wealth that doesn’t benefit them, and they start seizing oil terminals.”

Namibia Pilot Program
http://usbig.net/links.html
http://globalpolicy.org/home/211-development/48036-a-basic-income-program-in-otjivero.html
“Haarmann is talking about Namibia the way a doctor discusses a patient’s symptoms. “Here,” he says, scrolling through his statistics, “more than two-thirds of the population live on less than $1 a day. The basic income scheme,” says Haarmann, “doesn’t work like charity, but like a constitutional right.” Under the plan, every citizen, rich or poor, would be entitled to it starting at birth. There would be no poverty test, no conditions and, therefore no social bureaucracy. And no one would be told what he or she is permitted to do with the money. The concept is being discussed in many countries of the world. In Germany, it has gained the support of politicians across the political spectrum, including Dieter Althaus, the conservative governor of the eastern state of Thuringia, and businessmen like drugstore chain owner Götz Werner. More than 50,000 German citizens have signed a petition to the German parliament. The pilot project is taking place in Otjivero, a settlement of 1,000 inhabitants in a hot and dusty region 100 kilometers (62 miles) east of Windhoek. A few weeks ago, Dirk Haarmann published his annual report: economic activity in the village has grown by 10 percent, more people are paying tuition and doctors’ fees, health is improving and the crime rate is down. Only 3 percent of the gross domestic product, or €115 million, would be enough to provide a basic income for all Namibians.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8JHSAVYT0

the Simplest Answer is Often Correct
http://nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/titan20100603.html
What is Consuming Hydrogen and Acetylene on Titan?
“Two new papers based on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft scrutinize the complex chemical activity on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. While non-biological chemistry offers one possible explanation, some scientists believe these chemical signatures bolster the argument for a primitive, exotic form of life or precursor to life on Titan’s surface. According to one theory put forth by astrobiologists, the signatures fulfill two important conditions necessary for a hypothesized “methane-based life.” One key finding comes from a paper that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene. This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. On Titan, where temperatures are around minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, a methane-based organism would have to use a substance that is liquid as its medium for living processes, but not water itself. Water is frozen solid on Titan’s surface and much too cold to support life as we know it. The list of liquid candidates is very short: liquid methane and related molecules like ethane. While liquid water is widely regarded as necessary for life, there has been extensive speculation published in the scientific literature that this is not a strict requirement. In addition Cassini’s spectrometer detected an absence of water ice on the Titan surface, but loads of benzene and another material, which appears to be an organic compound that scientists have not yet been able to identify. “Titan’s atmospheric chemistry is cranking out organic compounds that rain down on the surface so fast that even as streams of liquid methane and ethane at the surface wash the organics off, the ice gets quickly covered again,” Clark said. “All that implies Titan is a dynamic place where organic chemistry is happening now.”"

Methane-Based Life
http://dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/03/life-of-saturns-titan-could-it-be-methane-based.html
“Saturn’s giant moon Titan has water frozen as hard as granite and Great Lakes-sized bodies of fed by a complete liquid cycle, much like the hydrological cycle on Earth, but made up of methane and ethane rather than on water. Methane-natural gas-assumes an Earth-like role of water on Titan. It exists in enough abundance to condense into rain and form puddles on the surface within the range of temperatures that occur on Titan. “The ironic thing on Titan is that although it’s much colder than Earth, it actually acts like a super-hot Earth rather than a snowball Earth, because at Titan temperatures, methane is more volatile than water vapor is at Earth temperatures,” even going so far as to call Titan’s climate ‘tropical’, even though it sounds odd for a moon that orbits Saturn more than nine times farther from the sun than Earth. But on Titan, which rotates only once every 16 days, “the tropical weather system extends to the entire planet.”"

The team found two types of bacteria living in Lost Hammer that feed off the methane and likely breathe sulfate.

Non-Hypothetical
http://sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=73778
Bacteria Suited for Life on Mars Discovered
“Researchers have discovered that methane-eating bacteria survive in a unique spring located on Axel Heiberg Island in Northern Canada. The Canadian spring’s sub-zero water is so salty it doesn’t freeze and it has no consumable oxygen in it. There are, however, big bubbles of methane that come to the surface, which had provoked the researchers’ curiosity as to whether the gas was being produced geologically or biologically and whether anything could survive in such an extreme hypersaline sub-zero environment. “We were surprised that we did not find methanogenic bacteria that produce methane at Lost Hammer,” Whyte said. “But we did find other very unique anaerobic organisms — organisms that survive by essentially eating methane and probably breathing sulfate instead of oxygen.”"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJEipHtz3yI

Flammable Methane Rivers, Flammable Methane Rain
http://newscientist.com/article/dn6910-methane-rivers-and-rain-shape-titans-surface.html
“Hills made of ice and rivers carved by liquid methane mark the surface of Saturn’s giant moon. Scientists speculated long ago that some kind of hydrocarbon liquids might flow on Titan. They now know that the fluid that carved the moon’s rivers and channels is methane. “Titan is a flammable world.” But all the oxygen is trapped in ice. “That’s a good thing, or Titan would have exploded a long time ago.”

imagery from Galileo showing emission of gases

Exopolitics (n. art or science of government as concerned with creating/influencing policy toward extraterrestrial beings)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufCqRa5KZyk

As In : Are State Secrets Safe From Telepathy?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8662822.stm
http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/05/serious-allegations-kalmyk-governor-leaks-classified-information-to-humanoid-aliens/
“A Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, made his claim in a television interview. MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern. He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets. The MP has written a letter to Mr Medvedev raising a list of his concerns. In his letter he says that – assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke – it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin. He also asks if there are official guidelines for what government officials should do if contacted by aliens, especially if those officials have access to state secrets. During the interview, Ilyumzhinov openly discussed his 1997 encounter with benevolent aliens: he came home to his Moscow apartment, watched some TV, read a bit, and drifted off to sleep. Mid-drift, he heard the balcony door open. Then someone called to him. Ilyumzhinov went to check it out, only to discover a hovering transparent tube, which he, naturally, entered. Inside, humanoids in yellow spacesuits awaited him. They had a pleasant talk, which occurred on the level of mindwaves because, Ilyumzhinov said, “there wasn’t quite enough oxygen.” The humanoids, who were friendly, told Ilyumzhinov that they were not yet ready for direct contact with human humans. Instead, they gave him a tour of the ship and sent him on his way. Lebedev wants to know, did Ilyumzhinov let the President know about his contacts with such beings? And, while we’re at it, “who else among the governors of the Russian Federations, members of the government, and other federal civil servants is communicating with aliens?” “Dmitry Anatolyevich,” Lebedev wrote, addressing the Medvedev by his patronymic, “you will agree that, unless Ilyumzhinov is bluffing, then this information is historically significant. If possible, I ask you to brief the deputies of the Federal Duma about your conclusions.” Medvedev has yet to respond.”

Need to Know
http://extracampaign.org/
http://bluebookarchive.org/
http://presidentialufo.com/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk

the Disclosure Project
http://disclosureproject.org/
http://youtube.com/user/DisclosureLobby
http://disclosureproject.org/docgallery.shtml
http://web.archive.org/web/20021202090635/http://www.cohenufo.org/Military+Nuclear+Specialists+Testify+To+UFO+Reality.htm

Lt. Colonel Dwynne Arneson, US Air Force (retired): “I was the top-secret control officer at Malmstom AFB for the 20th Air Division. I happened to see a message that came through my communications center. It said…that ‘A UFO was seen near missile silos’…and it was hovering. It said that the crew going on duty and the crew coming off duty all saw the UFO just hovering in mid-air. It was a metallic circular object and from what I understand, the missiles were all shut down. What I mean by ‘missiles going down’ is that they went dead. And something turned those missiles off, so they couldn’t be put back in a mode for launching.”

Acknowledgment
http://aolnews.com/weird-news/article/exopoliticians-say-governments-must-start-planning-for-alien-visits/19456520
“According to Salla, the issues include deciding how the alien presence will be announced (he advocates announcing the presence of microbes and working up to more sentient beings), and who will be in control — a secret committee or a corporate entity. Of course, another big issue is determining the protocol for contact between humans and aliens, lest either side be exposed to strange viruses, a Romeo and Juliet situation between Martians and Earthlings — or worse. “A big question is how will humans interact with aliens,” Salla said. “If someone is threatened by one, will they take a shot at them while driving by? And, if so, will this be as illegal as shooting a human?” Luckily, for Salla and the others in this pioneering form of paranormal political science, they aren’t the only ones asking these questions. “In the last six months, both the Vatican and the Royal Society of London have held astrobiological conferences studying the implications of life found on other worlds,” he said. Other exopoliticians, like political activist Stephen Bassett, believe that the governments of the world — especially the United States — don’t want to give such a momentous announcement to the U.N. Although Bassett believes any such announcement would be made by one nation, Webre says he and other exopoliticians have been talking with members of the U.N. General Assembly regarding U.N. Resolution 33/426, which is a proposal to set up a Department of Extraterrestrials Affairs. Salla says the extreme divide between cynics like Hawking and optimists like the Vatican, which has declared that God may have created theologically minded beings on other planets besides Earth, is OK, just as long as the debate is happening. “While one can heartily disagree with Hawking’s public policy recommendation of ignoring intelligent alien life, he is to be congratulated for elevating exopolitical study as a ‘perfectly rational’ discussion,” Salla said.

UN report on UFOs 14-July 1978; Gordon Cooper, Jacques Vallee, Claude Poher, Allen Hynek, Sir Eric M. Gairy with UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim

Hawking : ‘Think of Columbus, + How Well That Turned Out’
http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece
“Stephen Hawking has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.” He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Mall as Organic Greenhouse
http://deadmalls.com/
http://rentedspaces.com/2010/03/12/future-farmers-of-the-mall/
“Shopping malls may be on the brink of major reinvention and adaptive reuse…as farms. The Galleria Mall in Cleveland, Ohio is leading the way by growing organic food for mall patrons and local restaurants. The mall has transformed the lost retail space within its glass-top confines into a gigantic, organic-food greenhouse. The idea sprouted when the mall’s marketing and events coordinator Vicky Poole teamed up with Jack Hamilton, a business owner in the Galleria. Together they began operating Gardens Under Glass, a hydroponic garden in the Galleria at Erieview in downtown Cleveland. The project is funded by a $30,000 start-up grant from the Civic Innovation Lab. Gardens Under Glass at the Galleria will start with lettuce, spinach, peas, tomatoes, and herbs, and, if successful, add fruits, more vegetables and edible flowers. Food will be raised hydroponically, aquaponically and in organic soils through a combination of raised beds, vines and vertical structural supports. The plan also includes composting and using nutrient-rich waste from aquariums to nourish the plants. The duo hopes that the project will be a model for sustainable farming, while bringing additional visitors or curious onlookers to the mall’s stores. If successful and implemented at the mall on a larger scale, Gardens Under Glass could help extend Ohio’s short growing season and increase the amount of food dollars spent locally. It could also serve as a case study for communities struggling to figure out productive uses for otherwise underutilized or abandoned shopping malls. The adaptive reuse of the space is not without obstacles. For example, even though the glass ceiling provides ample light and the interior location significantly reduces possible pests, the mall was not built to be insulated and heated like a typical greenhouse. So, hardy crops need to be selected. Another challenge — and opportunity — is finding people to tend the mall’s gardens. For now, the workers will be volunteers, but one can easily imagine a future where farmers are hired to work inside the mall. It’s predicted that shopping malls and other “single use” structures will slowly disappear over the next thirty years. That could be the extreme pressure required for positive reinvention.”

Food Court
http://civicinnovationlab.org/newly_funded.aspx
http://web.me.com/gardensunderglass/gardensunderglass/Opportunities.html
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/02/galleria_has_gardens_now.html
“Millions in Cleveland have passed through the Galleria at Erieview, sun glinting on its barrel-shaped glass roof. But it took a nurseryman’s granddaughter to look up and think: This place looks like a giant greenhouse. Now Vicky Poole, the Galleria’s marketing and events director, who worked on her grandpa’s farm as a child, expects that by late spring or early summer, there will be fresh tomatoes for sale among the shops and galleries at the downtown Cleveland mall. Very fresh — as in vine-grown in bags and troughs hanging from steel stair banisters and ceiling beams in the shopping center that stretches between East Ninth and East 12th streets. “I know of no other urban garden in the country like this,” said Hamilton about Gardens Under Glass. Poole got the idea last year when she spotted a photo of dozens of plants growing on a two-story window grid in a New York cafe. “I said, ‘That’s our food court.’” They dream of hosting school groups and teams of volunteer urban gardeners eager to work beds of herbs and greens and vine systems raised hydroponically, aquaponically and in organic soils. On Thursday, Poole gave a presentation to the Cleveland chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, composed of professionals and students. “One of the students came up to me after and said, ‘Have you ever considered growing aereoponically?’ ” said Poole. “I invited him to come in and help me set up a system.”

Because of Ohio’s short growing season and the fact that the Galleria will not be heated to greenhouse temperatures, Poole is focusing on easily raised greens, herbs and tomatoes. That is good news for the manager of Sweetwater’s Cafe Sausalito, a long-established Galleria restaurant. He sells a lot of salads at lunchtime. “I’m very excited about the project,” said Chandrababu, who has already given a list of the herbs the restaurant uses to Poole. Michele and Mark Bishop, who operate Urban Organics from their Brunswick farm, will soon provide Sweet Peet, an organic mulch, as well as organic soils to Gardens Under Glass. Meanwhile, Poole, 57, and Hamilton, 44, have collected products from other such vendors to grow the plants they are purchasing with grant money. “So far, we haven’t had to pay for a thing,” said Poole, who is also searching for a composting system that would take care of scraps from the food court. Within two weeks, two portable 6-by-12-foot beds will be installed on the first floor of the Galleria, where passers-by will watch greens grow. “We’ll be propagating seeds for that this week,” said Poole. By summer, she expects lush banister mountings of greens and tomatoes. “It will be beautiful.”

Contact
Vicky Poole & Jack Hamilton
http://facebook.com/gardensunderglass
e-mail : gardensunderglass [at] yahoo

Seed Libraries
http://seedsavers.org/
http://www.ecologycenter.org/basil/
http://treehugger.com/files/2010/05/maker-faire-2010-seed-libraries-prove-tough-to-sprout.php
“SPROut is based on gardeners taking only the seeds they need for the plants they’re really going to grow (one doesn’t need a whole packet of seeds of broccoli when they only have room for 5 plants) and bringing back at least one seed of that type of plant. The more gardeners who participate, the more diverse the seed library becomes as members contribute the plants that they enjoy the most.

Co-operatives
http://www.ncba.coop/ncba/about-co-ops
http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/13/cooperatives-co-op-leadership-citizenship-ethisphere.html
“Many co-ops, from purchasing ones–people who pool together resources to buy in bulk–to agricultural ones, have reported positive or at least even sales through the recession. Why? Perhaps at least partly because the public has grown more hospitable to cooperative values. Cabot Creamery, an agricultural cooperative that sells dairy products nationally, hasn’t suffered during the recession. The people there believe it’s because of customers’ affinity for their brand, which stresses its ownership by farmers and its stewardship of the land. Most U.S. farmers don’t own the brands under which their goods are sold; they’re just atomized commodity producers. At Cabot each farmer can participate democratically in running the co-op. That and their shared ownership gives them great loyalty to it. Cabot’s strengths have kept it financially healthy even as households have cut back on spending.”

Farmland in Trinoma’s center lobby

Scientists Create Synthetic Organism
http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127010591&ft=1&f=1001
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703559004575256470152341984.html
“Scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions. Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale. Several companies are already seeking to take advantage of the new field, called synthetic biology, which combines chemistry, computer science, molecular biology, genetics and cell biology to breed industrial life forms that can secrete fuels, vaccines or other commercial products. Synthetic Genomics Inc., a company founded by Dr. Venter, provided $30 million to fund the experiments and owns the intellectual-property rights to the cell-creation techniques. The company has a $600 million contract with Exxon Mobil Corp. to design algae that can capture carbon dioxide and make fuel. To make the synthetic cell, a team of 25 researchers at labs in Rockville, Md., and San Diego, led by bioengineer Daniel Gibson and Mr. Venter, essentially turned computer code into a new life form. They started with a species of bacteria called Mycoplasma capricolum and, by replacing its genome with one they wrote themselves, turned it into a customized variant of a second existing species, called Mycoplasma mycoides, they reported. To begin, they wrote out the creature’s entire genetic code as a digital computer file, documenting more than one million base pairs of DNA in a biochemical alphabet of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. They edited that file, adding new code, and then sent that electronic data to a DNA sequencing company called Blue Heron Bio in Bothell, Wash., where it was transformed into hundreds of small pieces of chemical DNA. To assemble the strips of DNA, the researchers said they took advantage of the natural capacities of yeast and other bacteria to meld genes and chromosomes in order to stitch those short sequences into ever-longer fragments until they had assembled the complete genome, as the entire set of an organism’s genetic instructions is called. They transplanted that master set of genes into an emptied cell, where it converted the cell into a different species. The scientists didn’t give the new organism its own species name, but they did give its synthetic genome an official version number, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. To set this novel bacterium—and all its descendants—apart from any natural creation, Dr. Venter and his colleagues wrote their names into its chemical DNA code, along with three apt quotations from James Joyce and others. These genetic watermarks will, eventually, allow the researchers to assert ownership of the cells. “You have to have a way of tracking it,” said Stanford ethicist Mildred Cho, who has studied the issues posed by the creation of such organisms.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WbNu_mLzNk

No Gods No Masters
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/age_of_wonder10/age_of_wonder_index.html
http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/may/20/craig-venter-life-god
“Craig Venter’s production of an entirely artificial bacterium marks another triumph of the only major scientific programme driven from the beginning by explicit atheism. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was a militant atheist, who refused to accept a job at a newly founded Cambridge college if it had a chapel, and who invented molecular biology partly to prove there was nothing special or mystical about life: it was just the behaviour of complex chemicals acting in accordance with the normal laws of nature. Now Venter says he has built a living bacterium from nothing but chemicals and code: “Our cell has been totally derived from four bottles of chemicals”, he says. In fact, it was grown using yeast as an intermediary, but to the molecular biologist, organisms are just another kind of apparatus. It looks like the complete triumph of the materialist programme. Atheists of the Dawkins type will take it as practical proof that there is no need to hypothesise God at all: we can make life without any miracles, and there’s no need to imagine a creator. Descending from these rarefied speculations, there’s a much lower and more urgent sense in which Venter will disturb theologians and atheists alike. The man who can make life can also give humans apparently godlike powers. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” said the Californian visionary Stewart Brand 40 years ago; and Venter’s techniques should make it possible to engineer bacteria to do almost anything we can imagine, from cleaning up the oceans to supplying us with energy. The bacteria found in nature can work like the philosophers” stone, transforming almost any substance into anything. The trouble with gods, as the Greek philosophers observed, is that they were not any morally better than humans, just more powerful.”

1st Self-Replicating Synthetic
http://jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first
http://jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/
http://jcvi.org/cms/fileadmin/site/research/projects/first-self-replicating-bact-cell/fact-sheet1.pdf
http://sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/science.1190719v1.pdf

Previously On Spectre _ Pan-Fried T-Rex with Apricot Mint Chutney Glaze
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/pan-fried-t-rex-with-apricot-mint-chutney-glaze/
Algae to Oil – Hacking Nature (for Salvation and Profit)
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/hacking-nature-for-salvation-and-profit/

No Longer Geostationary, So Much : Rogue ZombieSats
http://theregister.co.uk/2010/05/03/wayward_satellite/
http://csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0509/Satellite-goes-rogue-threatens-other-spacecraft
“An out-of-control Intelsat satellite that stopped communicating with ground crews last month poses a threat to other satellites as it wanders about 36,000km above the earth. Dubbed Galaxy 15, the satellite stopped responding to ground controllers on April 5. Since then, engineers have sent more than 150,000 commands to the roving craft in an attempt to regain control of it. In what industry officials called an unprecedented event, Intelsat’s Galaxy 15 communications satellite has remained fully “on,” with its telecommunications payload still functioning. The satellite’s manufacturer has said an intense solar storm in early April may be to blame. On May 3, Intelsat will play what as of Friday appeared to be its last card by blasting Galaxy 15 with a more powerful signal intended not to salvage the satellite, but to force it into a complete shutdown. Even if the May 3 action succeeds, Galaxy 15 will remain a problem as it continues to wander the geostationary arc. But it is a problem that satellite operators know how to deal with. Industry experts say there are several dozen spacecraft, sometimes called “zombiesats,” that for various reasons were not removed from the geostationary highway before failing completely. Depending on their position at the time of failure, these satellites tend to migrate toward one of two libration points, at 105 degrees west and 75 degrees east. Figures compiled by XL Insurance of New York, an underwriter of space risks, say that more than 160 satellites are gathered at these two points.”

http://sxi.ngdc.noaa.gov/sxi_greatest.html
Above: A modern solar flare recorded Dec. 5, 2006, by the X-ray Imager onboard NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite. The flare was so intense, it actually damaged the instrument that took the picture. Researchers believe Carrington’s flare was much more energetic than this one.

A Carrington Event
http://geomag.bgs.ac.uk/carrington.html
http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1859MNRAS..20…13C
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/21jan_severespaceweather/
“The strongest geomagnetic storm on record is the Carrington Event of August-September 1859, named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the instigating solar flare with his unaided eye. Geomagnetic activity triggered by the explosion electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire; Northern Lights spread as far south as Cuba and Hawaii; auroras over the Rocky Mountains were so bright, the glow woke campers who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. “A contemporary repetition of the Carrington Event would cause … extensive social and economic disruptions,” the report warns. Power outages would be accompanied by radio blackouts and satellite malfunctions; telecommunications, GPS navigation, banking and finance, and transportation would all be affected. Some problems would correct themselves with the fading of the storm: radio and GPS transmissions could come back online fairly quickly. Other problems would be lasting: a burnt-out multi-ton transformer, for instance, can take weeks or months to repair. The total economic impact in the first year alone could reach $2 trillion, some 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina or, to use a timelier example, a few TARPs.”

Solar Flares and You
http://sxi.ngdc.noaa.gov/sxi_greatest.html
“Lanzerotti became aware of the effects of solar geomagnetic storms on terrestrial communications when a huge solar flare on August 4, 1972, knocked out long-distance telephone communication across Illinois. That event, in fact, caused AT&T to redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. A similar flare on March 13, 1989, provoked geomagnetic storms that disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours; aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, “I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes.” Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare. In fact, a recent paper estimates potential damage to the 900-plus satellites currently in orbit could cost between $30 billion and $70 billion. The best solution: have a pipeline of comsats ready for launch.”

Space Weather

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm

“When a large geomagnetic storm happens again, the most obvious victims will be satellites. Many communications satellites, such as Anik E1 and E2 in 1994 and Telstar 401 in 1997, have been compromised or lost in this way. A large solar storm can cause one to three years’ worth of satellite lifetime loss in a matter of hours and produce hundreds of glitches, ranging from errant but harmless commands to destructive electrostatic discharges. But at least our satellites have been specifically designed to function under the vagaries of space weather. According to studies, the magnetic storm of May 15, 1921, would have caused a blackout affecting half of North America had it happened today. A much larger storm, like that of 1859, could bring down the entire grid.”

Previously on Spectre
spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/auroral-current/
spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/stars-have-weather/
spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/solar-flares-and-other-protections/

the 23rd Cycle
http://www.solarstorms.org/S23rdCycle.html
http://www.solarstorms.org/Scommun.html
“The chronicle of telegraph, short-wave, satellite and electrical outages is a major reminder of the constancy of the space weather impact upon human technology.

August 28 – September 2, 1859 – American telegraphists had only a short time to puzzle over atmospheric electricity on their 1000-mile lines when in 1859, the Great Auroras of August 28 and September 4 blazed forth and lit up the skies of nearly every major city on the planet. It was one of the most remarkable displays ever seen in the United States up until that time. These aurora were so exceptional that the American Journal of Science and Arts published no fewer than 158 accounts from around the world describing what the display looked like, the telegraphic disruptions they produced, and assorted theoretical speculations. Normal business transactions requiring telegraphic exchanges were completely shut down in the major world capitals. In France, telegraphic connections were disrupted as sparks literally flew from the long transmission lines. There were even some near-electrocutions. In one instance, Fredrick Royce a telegraph operator in Washington D.C reported that, “During the auroral display, I was calling Richmond, and had one hand on the iron plate. Happening to lean towards the sounder, which is against the wall, my forehead grazed a ground wire. Immediately I received a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant. An old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead to the shoulder. ”

May 13, 1921 – The prelude to this storm began with a major sunspot sighted on the limb of the sun vast enough to be seen with the naked eye through smoked glass. The spot was 94,000 miles long and 21,000 miles wide and by May 14th was near the center of the sun in prime location to unleash an earth-directed flare. The 3-degree magnetic bearing change among the five worst events recorded ended all communications traffic from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi. By 10:00 PM May 15, Washington DC was cut off telegraphically from the rest of the United States. Lines carrying more than 1000 volts of electricity ‘blown out fuses, injured electrical apparatus and done other things which had never been caused by any ground and ocean current known in the past’. The company would probably have to send ships to drag up the undersea cables to repair them. The electrical ocean currents had found the weakest spots in the cable insulation and caused severe damage. Apparently three of the Western Union transatlantic cables were affected. The entire signal and switching system of the New York Central Railroad below 125th street was put out of operation, followed by a fire in the control tower at 57th Street and Park Avenue.

April 29, 1937 – Magnetic storm ‘worst in century. Canada telegraph experiences severe disturbances. [New York Times 4/29 p. 23]

July 6, 1941 – Short wave blackouts during World War II

February 10, 1958 – The Great Aurora colored the skies over Chicago and Boston. In a foretaste of what would become a common, and expensive, problem decades later, the Explorer 1 satellite launched two weeks earlier, suddenly lost its primary radio system. The geomagnetic activity knocked out telecommunications circuits all across Canada, and although it was not visible in the New York area, it was so brilliant over Europe it aroused fears of conflagrations. The Monday storm cutoff the United States from radio contact with the rest of the world following an afternoon of ‘jumpy connections’ that ended with a complete black out by 3:00 PM, although contact with South America seemed unaffected. By evening, radio messages to Europe could occasionally be sent and received. Radio and TV viewers in the Boston area, however, were reportedly having their own amusing problems. For three hours, they fiddled with their TVs and radios as their sets went haywire, at times blanking out entirely, or changing stations erratically. Channel 7 viewers began getting Channel 7 broadcasts from Manchester Vermont, while Channel 4 viewers received ghostly blends of the local Boston station and one in Providence, Rhode Island. Viewers had just finished watching the ‘Lawrence Welk Show’ at 9:30 PM and were preparing to watch a nationally-broadcast TV movie ‘Meeting in Paris’ on Channel 4, or listen to a boxing match. What they hadn’t counted on was that they would get to do both at the same time. During a passionate love scene, the audio portion of the movie was replaced by the blow-by-blow details of the boxing match: “Smith gave him a left to the jaw and a short right hook to the button. — But darling we love each other so much. — A left hook to the jaw flattened Smith and he’s down for the count. — Kiss me again my sweet.” [New York Times 2/12 p. 16, Boston Globe 2/11 p.27]

March 13-14 1989 – Solar storm triggered the Quebec Blackout that affected 5 million people for up to 12 hours. Geostationary satellites, which used the Earth’s magnetic field to determine their orientation, had to be manually controlled to keep them from literally flipping upside down as the orientation of the magnetic field became disturbed and changed direction. Records show that some low altitude, high-inclination, and polar-orbiting satellites experienced uncontrolled tumbling. [New York Times 3/13 p.1 Boston Globe 3/14 p.6, EOS Transactions 11/14 p. 1479]

October 29, 2003 – This Halloween Storm spawned auroras that were seen over most of North America. Extensive satellite problems were reported, including the loss of the $450 million Midori-2 research satellite. Highly publicized in the news media. A huge solar storm impacted the Earth, just over 19 hours after leaving the sun. This is probably the second fastest solar storm in historic times, only beaten by the perfect solar storm in the year 1859 which spent an estimated 17 hours in transit.

November 4, 2003 – One of the most powerful x-ray flares ever detected , it swamped the sensors of dozens of satellites, causing satellite operations anomalies, but no aurora. Originally classified as an X28 flare, it was upgrade by OAA scientists to X34 a month later. Astronauts hid deep within the body of the International Space Station, but still reported radiation effects and ocular ‘shooting stars’. Highly publicized in the news media but produced no aurora. It was also not seen as a white-light flare.”

SuperWeeds
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto_and_the_Roundup_Ready_Controversy
http://nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html
“Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds. To fight them, farmers are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing. The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.”

Sterile Seed Monopoly
http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125906838
http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122498255
“It’s time to buy seed again, but hundreds of seed companies have gone under in the past two decades. Critics of the big agriculture biotech company Monsanto say its popular Roundup Ready technology is to blame for that. Roundup Ready is a line of gene-modified seeds that inoculate plants against a herbicide, Roundup, also made by Monsanto, that kills just about everything else. Ulrich says his seed costs shot up almost 50 percent last year. That’s because farmers are contractually prohibited from saving seeds and planting them the following year. Farmers face lawsuits if they try to save and replant the genetically modified seed because they don’t own the technology. More than 9 out of 10 soybean seeds carry the Roundup Ready trait. It’s about the same for cotton and just a little lower for corn. Now Monsanto has invented something new, called Roundup Ready 2 Yield. It uses the gene as the original, just placed in a different spot in the genome. Monsanto says that boosts yield. Interesting timing: Monsanto’s patent on Roundup Ready 1 expires in 2014 and with it, a revenue stream of maybe half a billion dollars a year in royalties. That’s unless it can switch farmers over to Roundup Ready 2. Meanwhile, the end of the Roundup Ready patent will very likely give farmers a chance to do something they haven’t for years: plant the seed they’ve harvested. “I don’t care how good Roundup Ready 2 is; if you tell me I can save back my own seed, I’m going to plant my own seed,” Ulrich says. The problem for guys like Ulrich will be finding seed that has just the Roundup Ready gene alone, one not stacked with other patented traits. After all, if he can’t find the seed in the first place, he can’t grow it.”

Nature Predictably Defiant
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/05/04/how-to-make-a-superweed/
“In the ancient empire of Sumer 4500 years ago, farmers put sulfur on their crops. The Romans used pitch and grease. Europeans learned to extract chemicals from plants. In 1807, chemists isolated pyrethrum from an Armenian daisy. To stop the San Jose scale, they tried whale oil. They tried kerosene and water. One of the best treatments they found was a mix of lime and sulfur. After a few weeks of spraying, the San Jose scale would disappear. By 1900, however, the lime-sulfur cure was failing. An entomologist named A. L. Melander found some San Jose scales living happily under a thick crust of dried lime-sulfur spray. In the short term, Melander suggested that farmers switch to fuel oil to fight scales, but he warned that they would eventually become resistant to fuel oil as well. In fact, the best way to keep the scales from becoming entirely resistant to pesticides was, paradoxically, to do a bad job of applying those herbicides. By allowing some susceptible scales to survive, farmers would keep their susceptible genes in the scale population. “Thus we may make the strange assertion that the more faulty the spraying this year the easier it will be to control the scale the next year,” Melander predicted.

In 1970 a scientist at the Monsanto Corporation found a chemical that seemed to hold out great hope–glyphosate, also known as Roundup. Glyphosate kills weeds by blocking the construction of amino acids that are essential for the survival of plants. It attacks enzymes that only plants use, with the result that it’s harmless to people, insects, and other animals. Roundup went on the market in 1974. In 1986, scientists engineered plants to be resistant to glyphosate, by inserting genes from bacteria that could produce amino acids even after a plant was sprayed with herbicides. In the 1990s Monsanto and other companies began to sell glyphosate-resistant corn, cotton, sugar beets, and many other crops. But after glyphosate-resistant crops had a few years to grow, farmers began to notice horseweed and morning glory and other weeds encroaching once more into their fields. What’s striking is how many different ways weeds have found to overcome the chemical. What makes the evolution of Roundup resistance all the more dangerous is how it doesn’t respect species barriers. Scientists have found evidence that once one species evolves resistance, it can pass on those resistance genes to other species. They just interbreed, producing hybrids that can then breed with the vulnerable parent species. In a recent interview, Powles predicted that the Roundup resistance catastophe is just going to get worse, not just in the United States but everywhere where Roundup is used intensively. It’s not a hopeless situation, however. Farmers may be able to slow the spread of resistance by mixing up the kinds of seeds they use, even by fostering vulernable weeds in the way Melander suggested.”

No Recusal
http://scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Monsanto_Company_v._Geertson_Seed_Farms
http://current.com/news/92330224_conflict-of-interest-ex-monsanto-lawyer-clarence-thomas-to-hear-major-monsanto-case.htm
“In Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case which could have an enormous effect on the future of the American food industry. This is Monsanto’s third appeal of the case, and if they win a favorable ruling from the high court, a deregulated Monsanto may find itself in position to corner the markets of numerous U.S. crops, and to litigate conventional farmers into oblivion. Here’s where it gets a bit dicier: from the years 1976 – 1979, Clarence Thomas worked as an attorney for Monsanto. Thomas apparently does not see this as a conflict of interest and has not recused himself. Alfalfa is the fourth most widely grown crop in the United States, behind corn, soybeans, and wheat. Alfalfa is very easily cross-pollinated by bees and by wind. The plant is also perennial, meaning GMO plants could live on for years. “The way this spreads so far and wide, it will eliminate the conventional alfalfa industry,” said Trask. “Monsanto will own the entire alfalfa industry.”"

http://www.jonathanterranova.com/order81.php

And Other Bad Options
http://deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

1. Create a Burn Zone
http://google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gV0p8P5QaVLyjmDfzlfO0W_59k9Q
“Emergency teams launched a “controlled burn” operation on Wednesday to stop a giant oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico from washing up on Louisiana’s ecologically fragile coast. A fleet of skimming vessels deployed by the US Coast Guard and British energy giant BP were sweeping the most dense concentrations of crude into a 500-foot (150-meter) fire resistant boom. “This oil will then be towed to a more remote area, where it will be ignited and burned in a controlled manner,” a joint statement said. US Coast Guard told AFP that the initial burn-offs would be evaluated before any larger operations were attempted. “Today they are just seeing this as a kind of trial fire to see if it even can be done,” she said. “I believe that they use an actual accelerant to start it. You can’t just throw a match in it and have it start.” The accident has not disrupted offshore gulf oil production, which accounts for more than a quarter of the US energy supply.”

In Situ Burning
http://fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/fire01/art076.html
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/04/burning_should_have_started_a.html
“Federal officials should have started burning oil off the surface of the Gulf last week, almost as soon as the spill happened, said the former oil spill response coordinator for the NOAA. Ron Gouget, who also managed Louisiana’s oil response team for a time, said federal officials missed a narrow window of opportunity to gain control of the spill by burning last week, before the spill spread hundreds of miles across the Gulf, and before winds began blowing toward shore. Gouget was part of the group that created the 1994 In-Situ Burn pre-approval plan that was designed to allow federal responders to begin burning oil as soon as a major spill occurred. “They had pre-approval. The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away instead of waiting ten days to get permission,” Gouget said. “If you read the pre-approval plan, it speaks about Grand Isle, where the spill is. When the wind is blowing offshore out of the north, you have preapproval to burn in that region. If the wind is coming onshore, like it is now, you can’t burn at Grand Isle. They waited to do the test burn until the wind started coming onshore.” Asked why officials waited for a week before conducting even a test burn, Gouget said, “Good question. Maybe complacency was the biggest issue. They probably didn’t have the materials on hand to conduct the burn, which is unconscionable.” Gouget said officials could still make a big dent in the amount of oil that will hit seashores over the next several months by burning. “If they set up multiple boat/fire boom sets & begin a ‘bucket brigade’ grabbing fresh oil, they can set up a production system to remove huge amounts,” Gouget said. “They’ve got to ramp up the burn program. It’s one of the most important tools they have to limit the damage.”"

2. Send Underwater Robots
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/26/deepwater-horizon-spill-underwater-robots
“Underwater robots dived to the ocean floor yesterday in a new effort to staunch the 42,000 gallons of oil a day being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico in America’s worst offshore oil rig spill in 40 years. The robots will attempt to activate a blowout preventer, a 450-tonne valve on the ocean floor that offers the only timely option for stemming the flow. The plan put into operation yesterday called for four underwater robots to dive 1,500 metres (5,000 ft) below the surface of the water to try to activate the gargantuan system of pipes and valves that sits next to the well on the ocean floor. BP said it was the first time such an operation had been mounted at this depth.”

3. Build a Containment Dome
http://redorbit.com/news/science/1856257/engineers_rush_to_contain_us_oil_spill/index.html
“Just in case robotic submarines are not able to plug up the oil leak on a sunken rig in the Gulf of Mexico, engineers rushed Tuesday to build a giant containment dome to keep the spill quarantined. “It’s a dome that would be placed over the leak and instead of the oil leaking into the water column it would leak into this dome structure,” said a US coast guard spokesman. “They started working on the fabrication of this dome structure fairly recently and its estimated it will take two to four weeks to build.” The dome would gather the oil and allow workers to pump it out of the dome. “If you could picture a half dome on top of the leak and the oil collects inside of this dome and is pumped out from there, that is the idea behind it,” said Danner. The dimensions of the dome are still being worked out, but officials said it would be similar to welded steel containment structures called cofferdams that are already used in oil rig construction.

No Fly Zone
http://nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/15/world/europe/airport-closings-graphic.html
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/21/AR2010042102100.html
“The year of the earthquake has suddenly become the year of the volcano. It raises the question of what governments can do to prepare for — and adapt to — wild-card geological events that not only affect airliners but can also alter the planet’s climate for years at a stretch. Now airports are beginning to open again in Britain and the Netherlands, but no one can be entirely sure what will happen next in Iceland. Eyjafjallajokull could incite an eruption of its larger neighbor, Katla, which hasn’t erupted since 1918 and might be ready to rumble. In all three historically recorded eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull — in 920, 1612 and 1821 — Katla erupted soon thereafter.”

Opening Act?
http://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/second-more-powerful-icelandic-volcano-likely-to-explode-soon-1949600.html
“Each time Eyjafjallajokull has erupted in the past 2,000 years, Katla has exploded within six months. Professor McGuire pointed out that Katla was 10 times bigger than Eyjafjallajokull. It also has a much bigger ice cap, and it is the mixture of melting cold water and lava that causes explosions and for ash to shoot to high altitudes. Iceland’s President, Olafur Grimsson, indicated that Europe, and the world, would have to wake up to the risk posed by Katla. “Because the history of these volcanoes in my country shows that they will erupt regularly, and the time for Katla to erupt is coming close. I don’t say if, but when Katla will erupt, because it usually erupts every century and the last [major] one was in 1918.” The President said Iceland had been “waiting for that eruption” for some years, and had made preparations for rescue and emergency services. So I think it is high time for European governments and airline authorities to start planning for it.”

photograph by Marco Fulle

Volcanic Explosivity Index
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/index.php
http://guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/21/iceland-volcano-ash-extinction-human-race
“The map is almost uncannily similar to today’s: a spray of black dots showing the recorded sightings of a foul grey haze spreading across Europe – and all of it caused by clouds of ash from an immense volcano erupting far across the sea in Iceland. But this was a map made from data collected in 1783. The volcano was called Laki, it erupted for eight dismal months without cease, ruined crops, lowered temperatures and drastically altered the weather. It killed 9,000 people, drenched the European forests in acid rain, caused skin lesions in children and the deaths of millions of cattle. And, by one account, it was a contributing factor (because of the hunger-inducing famines) to the outbreak six years later of the French revolution.

It is worth remembering that ours is a world essentially made from and by volcanoes. There is perhaps no better recent example of the havoc that a big eruption can cause than that which followed the explosive destruction of Mt Toba, in northern Sumatra, some 72,000 years ago (which, in geological time, is very recent). The relics of this mountain today are no more than a very large and beautiful lake, 60 miles long and half a mile deep – the caldera that was left behind by what is by most reckonings the largest volcanic explosion known to have occurred on the planet in the last 25 million years. On the widely used volcanic explosivity index (VEI), Toba is thought to have been an eight (Eyjafjallajökull is by contrast listed as having a probable VEI rating of just two). About 680 cubic miles of rock were instantly vaporised, all of which was hurled scores of thousands of feet into the air. This this is what did the lasting damage, just as Iceland’s high-altitude rock-dust is doing today. But while we today are merely suffering a large number of inconvenienced people and a weakening of the balance sheets of some airlines, the effect on the post-Toban world was catastrophic: as a result of the thick ash clouds the world’s ambient temperature plummeted, perhaps by as much as 5C – and the cooling and the howling wave of deforestation and deaths of billions of animals and plants caused a sudden culling of the human population of the time, reducing it to maybe as few as 5,000 people, perhaps 1,000 breeding pairs.

Others of the 47 known VEI-8 volcanoes are more alarmingly recent. The newer of the great eruptions that helped form the mountains of today’s Yellowstone national park in Wyoming took place just 640,000 years ago, and all the current signs – such phenomena as the rhythmic slow rising and falling of the bed of the Yellowstone river, as if some giant creature is breathing far below – suggest another eruption is coming soon. When it does, it will be an American Armageddon: all of the north and west of the continent, from Vancouver to Oklahoma City, will be rendered uninhabitable, buried under scores of feet of ash. (I mentioned this once in a talk to a group of lunching ladies in Kansas City, soothing their apparent disquiet by adding that by “soon” I was speaking in geologic time, and that meant about 250,000 years, by which time all humankind would be extinct. A woman in the front row exploded with incredulous rage: “What? Even Americans will be extinct?”) Krakatoa’s immediate aftermath was dominated initially by dramatic physical effects – a series of tsunamis, a bang of detonation that was clearly heard (like naval gunfire, said the local police officer) 3,000 miles away, and a year’s worth of awe-inspiring evening beauty – astonishing sunsets of purple and passionfruit and salmon that had artists all around the world trying desperately to capture what they managed to see in the fleeting moments before dark…”

Available Now
http://networkworld.com/community/node/58829
“Who’s got the biggest cloud in the tech universe? Google? Amazon? Lots and lots of servers, but not even close. Their capacity pales to that of the biggest cloud on the planet, the network of computers controlled by the Conficker computer worm. Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries at 230 top level domains globally, more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth. Like legitimate cloud vendors, Conficker is available for rent and is just about anywhere in the world a user would want their cloud to be based. Users can choose the amount of bandwidth they want, the kind of operating system they want to use and more. Customers have a variety of options for what services to put in the Conficker cloud, be it a denial-of-service attack, spam distribution or data exfiltration. Conficker is much more competitive than those legit vendors in many ways, Joffe continued. It has much more experience, dating back to 1998, has a larger footprint and unlimited new resources as it spreads malware far and wide to take over more computers. “And there are no costs. And there are no moral, ethical or legal constraints,” Joffe said, to chuckles from the audience. After all, the criminals stole their computing capacity from someone else.”

New Business Models
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/future-botnets-031510
“This solution to the hacker’s problem provides a glimpse into a busines model we might see in the not-too-distant future. It’s an evolutionary version of the botnet-for-hire or malware-as-a-service model that’s taken off in recent years. In Hansen’s model, an attacker looking to infiltrate a specific network would not spend weeks throwing resources against machines in that network, looking for a weak spot and potentially raising the suspicion of the company’s security team. Instead, he would contact a botmaster and give him a laundry list of the machines or IP addresses he’s interested in compromising. If the botmaster already has his hooks into the network, the customer could then buy access directly into the network rather than spending his own time and resources trying to get in. Kind of an interesting/scary thought, but it could easily be used to avoid the cost and danger of individual exploitation against a company for a hacker interested in target attacks. Rather, a brokerage for commodities (bots that come from interesting IPs/domains) could be created and used to sell off the individual nodes. This model makes sense on a number of levels and may well have been implemented already.”

Zeus Found in Amazon Cloud
http://securityfocus.com/brief/1046
“The cybercriminals behind the Zeus botnet used Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to host the central server used to control a portion of the compromised machines. A number of security experts have predicted that cybercriminals will increasingly find uses for legitimate cloud services, such as Amazon EC2 and Google’s App Engine. This week, hacker Moxie Marlinspike kicked off a wireless password cracking service hosted in the cloud. The service, WPA Cracker, can compare the hash from a WiFi Protected Access network against 135 million possibilities in 40 minutes.”

Botnet Wars
http://computerworld.com/s/article/9154618/New_Russian_botnet_tries_to_kill_rival
“An upstart Trojan horse program has decided to take on its much-larger rival by stealing data and then removing the malicious program from infected computers. Security researchers say that the relatively unknown Spy Eye toolkit added this functionality just a few days ago in a bid to displace its larger rival, known as Zeus. The feature, called “Kill Zeus,” apparently removes the Zeus software from the victim’s PC, giving Spy Eye exclusive access to usernames and passwords. Turf wars are nothing new to cybercriminals. Two years ago a malicious program called Storm Worm began attacking servers controlled by a rival known as Srizbi. And a few years before that, the authors of the Netsky worm programmed their software to remove rival programs Bagle and MyDoom. Spy Eye sells for about $500 on the black market, about one-fifth the price of premium versions of Zeus.”

Meanwhile : Africa Gets Broadband
http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2009/10/africa-home-of-worlds-largest-cyber.html
“Africa is home to about 100 million PCs, 80% of which are estimated to be infected with some kind of malware. This has occurred because the intense poverty throughout the continent has resulted in a pervasive distribution of pirated software and the inability to pay for Anti-Virus protection. Currently, most Internet access is via dial-up, but once broadband comes to Africa, all of those infected PCs will become an easy target for bot herders looking to build the next mega-botnet. What could a bad operator do with a botnet of that size? Pretty much anything he wants, including paralyzing an entire nation’s networked infrastructure. That’s all systems connected to the Internet, including power, water, communications, commerce, etc. Since Microsoft Windows is the OS that we are talking about, it falls on Microsoft to do something about this problem. One good first step would be what Microsoft’s Paul Cooke discusses – support pirated versions of Windows 7 with patches.”

Researcher makes adjustments to a Stirling Energy Systems solar dish-engine system

Solar Powered Engines
http://earth2tech.com/2010/03/30/solar-patent-king-boeing-teams-up-with-stirling-energy-systems/
http://earth2tech.com/2010/01/14/stirling-energy-to-kick-off-its-first-plant/
“A little known fact about Boeing: It’s got more solar patents than anyone else in the U.S. (14 solar thermal patents since 2002). Boeing has teamed up with solar thermal company Stirling Energy Systems to develop Boeing’s high-concentration photovoltaic solar power technology. Founded in 1996, Phoenix, Ariz.-based Stirling Energy has developed a 25 KW electric solar dish that focuses the sun rays directly onto a stirling engine. Most solar thermal technologies, by contrast, concentrate the sun’s rays onto liquid, which powers a turbine. Stirling isn’t the only company turning to stirling engines for solar power. One example is Infinia, which is backed by a gaggle of A-list Silicon Valley-ers, including Bill Gross’ Idealab and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.”

Previously Hand-Made
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-engines-the-future-of-solar-power
“Nearly 200 years after their invention, and decades after first being proposed as a method of harnessing solar energy, 60 sun-powered Stirling engines began generating electricity outside Phoenix, Ariz., for the first time. Such engines, which harness heat to expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely today other than in pacemakers and long-distance robotic spacecraft. In 1996, SES bought solar Stirling design and engineering patents from companies such as McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing. SES then partnered with Sandia National Laboratories, and over the next decade tweaked and refined the technology. Stirling engines are significantly more efficient at converting sunlight into energy than most photovoltaic panels or concentrating solar power plants. Proponents of the technology point to the advantages it has over other forms of solar power – particularly concentrating solar power (CSP), which requires significant amounts of water, a challenge in desert regions of the U.S. where solar power is most attractive – while Stirling engines require none other than small amounts for cleaning the mirrors. In addition, if one engine goes down, it has minimal impact on overall production.

SES faced a manufacturing challenge in preparing its SunCatchers for mass production though. “The systems at Sandia were basically hand-built,” says Charles Andraka, a Sandia engineer. For the Phoenix site, he notes, Sandia and SES engineers built 60 units in three months. “We have to do that many in a day for the larger plants.” In order to do this, SES turned to the experts in rapid production of engines and related parts: the automotive industry. In partnership with automotive companies such as Tower Automotive and Linamar Corporation, SES managed to reduce the parts in the PCU by 60 percent (to about 650) and slash the weight of the entire system by roughly 2,250 kilograms. The new systems have been running on test sites for more than 100,000 hours. Maricopa Solar also represents just one scalable module; each multi-megawatt field will be grouped first in 60-engine units that come together to generate 1.5 MW, then those larger units are linked to each other to produce up to 9 MW. Explains Coates, “With the large 750 MW commissions, we won’t have to wait until we have 750 MW of dishes before we start producing power. This means that the utility can get the power prior to the full build-out, which can take years to complete.” This is in comparison to parabolic trough or tower CSP technology, which doesn’t generate electricity until the entire system is complete.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq6iCO9KLKA

Combined Heat and Power
http://howstuffworks.com/stirling-engine.htm
http://guardian.co.uk/environment/2000/sep/02/energy.renewableenergy
“Householders could one day be producing as much electricity as all the country’s nuclear power stations combined, thanks to the revolutionary application of a device developed in the early 19th century. A new version of the device, the Stirling engine, is set to turn ordinary domestic gas boilers into miniature power stations, generating electricity whenever you switch on the central heating or hot water. It won’t make electricity meters run backwards. But for an estimated £500 extra on the price of a new boiler, the machine will generate electricity for the home for nothing, using excess heat that would otherwise escape out the flue. In Britain, a confidential report prepared for electricity companies by energy consultants EA Technology estimates that by 2025, 13m of the country’s 23m households could have their own little power station humming away in the boiler cupboard. In existing domestic gas boilers, about a third of the heat is wasted. With the latest make of Stirling engine fitted, that spare heat is used to drive a small generator. The idea of turning homes into power stations is known as “micro chp” (combined heat and power). EA Technology is championing a Stirling engine made by WhisperTech, a New Zealand company, which can generate a kilowatt of electricity – enough to power three fridges.”

Portable Power Plant
http://www.makezine.com/extras/29.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20080125110336/http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/08/a-visit-to-dean.html
“Over the past decade, Kamen, who made a fortune as inventor of the insulin pump and other medical devices, has spent some $40 million developing Stirling engines. “We run two villages in Bangladesh on Stirlings that run on freakin’ cow dung,” says Kamen, who envisions Stirling engines powering the world’s off-the-grid villages and using the waste heat produced by the engine to purify water. “I need some killer app to put this thing into production. And one way to do that would be to create the world’s first hybrid Stirling electric car.” Which led him to install a Stirling heat engine in an electric car made by Norway’s Think. That would not only extend the Thinks range by hundreds of miles but turn the car into a mobile generator. When electricity demand peaks during the day, thousands of Thinks plugged in at office parks could feed power back to the grid so utilities could avoid having to fire up planet-warming power plants. The Stirling engine would then recharge the car’s battery for the commute home. “If you have enough Thinks out there you would literally change the architecture of the grid,” says Kamen. “The big advantage is once we’re in production with that engine, where it will really be uniquely valuable is to the 1.6 billion people on this plant who’ve never used electricity,” says Kamen. “We will become the Con Edison of every village in Asia, Africa and Central America.”

Build Yr Own
http://www.howstuffworks.com/stirling-engine.htm
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol07/?pg=96#pg96
tutorial by William Gurstelle

A Fungus Thats Eats Oil Spills
http://time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,13102109001_1879838,00.html
http://fungi.com/mycotech/mycova.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=NPI8_-omzvsC
“What Stamets has discovered is that the enzymes and acids that mycelium produces to decompose this debris are superb at breaking apart hydrocarbons – the base structure common to many pollutants. So, for instance, when diesel oil-contaminated soil is inoculated with strains of oyster mycelia, the soil loses its toxicity in just eight weeks.”

Mycoremediation
http://ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html
http://planet.wwu.edu/archives/2008/articles/winter/shroom-vacuum.php
“Mushrooms eat more than just rotting wood. Give them oil, arsenic or even nerve gas, and they’ll give you back water and carbon dioxide. Mushrooms are nature’s prime decomposers, and they’re very good at what they do. They eat by releasing enzymes capable of breaking down substances from which they gain nutrients. Their usual diet consists of plants and other organic, or carbon-based, organisms. Since many toxins have similar chemical makeup to plants, fungi can break them down as well. These include petroleum products, pesticides, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals with estrogen, and even neurotoxins. Once the contaminants are broken down, the mushrooms are safe to eat. Mushrooms can also absorb heavy metals such as mercury, lead and arsenic. A species called oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus, have a particularly high tolerance for areas heavily contaminated with cadmium and mercury. This means oyster mushrooms can grow in high-mercury areas and still decompose other pollutants. Mushrooms that ingest heavy metals are no longer safe to eat, because the toxins remain concentrated in the mushroom instead of being broken down. For this reason, heavy-metal laden mushrooms must be removed after absorption to prevent the metals from reentering the area when the mushrooms die and decompose. Mycoremediation was first attempted in Bellingham in 1998, when Stamets and a team of researchers from Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories in Sequim, Wash. treated plots in a contaminated truck maintenance yard operated by the Washington State Department of Transportation. After four weeks, the plots not treated with spores remained unchanged, but the spore-rich plot had sprouted a large crop of oyster mushrooms. Over the next five weeks, the mushrooms matured, reproduced and then died. Their life cycle attracted insects, birds and other animals, and life flourished on the once-dead plot. Fungi have a much different structure than plants. Mushrooms are part of a larger organism known as the mycelium. Mycelia are complex webs of hair-like fibers that resemble the neurological pathways in the human brain. Although only one cell wall thick, mycelia are responsible for cycling nutrients through the fungus and its surrounding environment, according to Stamets’ book. Mycelium mats can grow very large and connect entire forests in a nutrient-sharing network. One specimen covered more than 2,400 acres on an Oregon mountaintop; possibly the largest living organism, according to the journal Nature.”

Mycotopia
http://salon.com/technology/feature/2002/11/25/mushrooms/index.html
“As reported in Jane’s Defence Weekly, one of Stamets’ strains was found to “completely and efficiently degrade” chemical surrogates of VX and sarin, the potent nerve gases Saddam Hussein loaded into his warheads. “We have a fungal genome that is diverse and present in the old-growth forests,” says Stamets. “Hussein does not. If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population … we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense.” It’s been more than 70 years since Alexander Fleming discovered that the mold fungus penicillium was effective against bacteria. And yet, complains Stamets, nobody has paid much attention to the antiviral and antibiotic properties of mushrooms — partly because Americans, unlike Asian cultures, think mushrooms are meant to be eaten, not prescribed. But with the emergence of multiple antibiotic resistance in hospitals, says Stamets, “a new game is afoot. The cognoscenti of the pharmaceuticals are now actively, and some secretly, looking at mushrooms for novel medicines.” Based on a recent study documenting the ability of a mushroom, Polyporus umbellatus, to completely inhibit the parasite that causes malaria, Stamets has come up with a mycofiltration approach to combating the disease. Stamets is currently shopping this idea around to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a front-runner in the effort to provide vaccinations in developing nations.”

Meanwhile, in Newtown Creek
http://riverkeeper.org/news-events/news/press-release-rvk-supports-epas-proposal-to-consider-newtown-creek-for-superfund-status/
http://scienceline.org/2007/01/24/liebach_env_greenpointe/
“For over 50 years, the Greenpoint section of northern Brooklyn has been sitting atop a staggering 17 million gallons of spilled oil—almost 50 percent more oil than was spilled in the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez supertanker in Alaska—and almost nothing has been done to clean it up. The early refineries were careless in their operations, and it’s likely that they started spilling almost as soon as they began operating. Unhampered by environmental laws, few refineries had containment systems to catch spills, so what was released could seep into whatever was around to soak it up. “It was a very messy industry,” says Basil Seggos, chief investigator of Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog organization. The biggest spill of all wasn’t revealed until 12 years after the Brooklyn Refinery shut down. During a helicopter patrol over Newtown Creek in early September of 1978, the Coast Guard noticed an oil slick on the surface of the water near Meeker Avenue, by the Peerless Importers site. An investigation found that the oil that had saturated the soil underneath nearly 55 acres in Greenpoint. The Coast Guard stopped the seep by installing recovery sumps—or basins—to collect the oil, but until 1989, little was done to address what lay beneath the surface. That was the year Exxon Mobil accepted responsibility for the oil under the ground. Anecdotes of people suffering from asthma and other diseases have been circulating in Greenpoint for years. In addition to the vapors potentially reaching people near the water, some of the petroleum in the creek is dissolved in groundwater, which is also leaking out from the aquifer. But no matter how many grout walls or boom systems are installed, stopping the seeps isn’t a cure-all—the leaks won’t cease until they’re traced to the source. For that to happen, though, there first needs to be a comprehensive removal of what’s inside the aquifer—not just of oil floating freely on the water table, but of the oil stuck to the sandy soil and gravel. The pumping approach could take up to 20 years.”

http://syncho.com/index.html
http://cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html
http://guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile
“During the early 70s, a rather remarkable experiment took place. Chile was in revolutionary ferment. In the capital Santiago, the beleaguered but radical marxist government of Salvador Allende, hungry for innovations of all kinds, was employing Stafford Beer to conduct a technological experiment known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since. Stafford Beer attempted, in his words, to “implant” an electronic “nervous system” in Chilean society. Voters, workplaces and the government were to be linked together by a new, interactive national communications network, which would transform their relationship into something profoundly more equal and responsive than before – a sort of socialist internet, decades ahead of its time.

As in many areas, the Allende government wanted to do things differently from traditional marxist regimes. “I was very much against the Soviet model of centralisation,” says Raul Espejo. Until then, obtaining and processing such valuable information – even in richer, more stable countries – had taken governments at least six months. But Project Cybersyn found ways round the technical obstacles. In a forgotten warehouse, 500 telex machines were discovered which had been bought by the previous Chilean government but left unused because nobody knew what to do with them. These were distributed to factories, and linked to two control rooms in Santiago. There a small staff gathered the economic statistics as they arrived, officially at five o’clock every afternoon, and boiled them down using a single precious supercomputer into a briefing that was dropped off daily at La Moneda, the presidential palace. Allende had once been a doctor and, Beer felt, instinctively understood his notions about the biological characteristics of networks and institutions. Just as significantly, the two men shared a belief that Cybersyn was not about the government spying on and controlling people. On the contrary, it was hoped that the system would allow workers to manage their workplaces, and that the daily exchange of information between the shop floor and Santiago would create trust and genuine cooperation – and the combination of individual freedom and collective achievement that had always been the political holy grail for many leftwing thinkers.

In October 1972, Allende faced his biggest crisis so far. Across Chile, with secret support from the CIA, conservative small businessmen went on strike. Food and fuel supplies threatened to run out. Cybersyn offered a way of outflanking the strikers: the telexes could be used to obtain intelligence about where scarcities were worst, and where people were still working who could alleviate them. The control rooms in Santiago were staffed day and night. People slept in them – even government ministers. The strike failed to bring down Allende. On September 10, a room was measured in La Moneda for the installation of an updated Cybersyn control centre, complete with futuristic control panels in the arms of chairs and walls of winking screens. The next day, the palace was bombed by the coup’s plotters. Beer was in London, lobbying for the Chilean government, when he left his final meeting before intending to fly back to Santiago and saw a newspaper billboard that read, “Allende assassinated.” The Chilean military found the Cybersyn network intact, and called in Espejo and others to explain it to them. But they found the open, egalitarian aspects of the system unattractive and destroyed it.”

Stafford Beer
http://metaphorum.org/
http://esrad.org.uk/resources/vsmg_3/screen.php?page=home/
http://cybsoc.org/StaffordCoup.wma
http://digitool.jmu.ac.uk:8881/R/CSKA9XEGH5341115KA516INXQBKKG542CUDPAXRN8KARHQRC26-00406?func=collections&collection_id=1234&local_base=stb

Viable System Model
http://mefeedia.com/entry/cybernetics-and-revolution-eden-medina/14957866
http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/
“Stafford is considered the ‘Father of Management Cybernetics” and at the heart of Stafford’s genius is the “Viable System Model” (VSM). Eden explains that “Cybersyn’s design cannot be understood without a basic grasp of this model, which played a pivotal role in merging the politics of the Allende government with the design of this technological system. They settled on an existing telex network previously used to track satellites. Like the Internet of today, this early network of machines was driven by the idea of creating a high-speed web of information exchange. Stafford had hoped to install “algedonic meters” or early warning public opinion meters in “a representative sample of Chilean homes that would allow Chilean citizens to transmit their pleasure or displeasure with televised political speeches to the government or television studio in real time.” [Stafford] dubbed this undertaking ‘ The People’s Project ’ and ‘ Project Cyberfolk ’ because he believed the meters would enable the government to respond rapidly to public demands, rather than repress opposing views.”

from Fanfare for Effective Freedom, by Stafford Beer
http://williambowles.info/sa/FanfareforEffectiveFreedom.pdf
“I am a scientist, but to be a technocrat would put me out of business as a man. I believe that cybernetics can do the job better than bureaucracy – and more humanely too. What is cybernetics that government should need it? It is, as I should prefer to define it today, “the science of effective organisation”. This is not to argue that all complex systems are really the same, nor yet that they are all in some way “analogous”. It is to argue that there are fundamental rules which, disobeyed, lead to instability, or to explosion, or to a failure to learn, adapt and evolve, in any complex system. And those pathological states do indeed belong to all complex systems – whatever their fabric, whatever their content – not by analogy, but as a matter of fact. Homeostasis is the tendency of a complex system to run towards an equilibrial state. This happens because the many parts of the complex system absorb each other’s capacity to disrupt the whole. If the system is to remain viable, if it is not to die, then we need the extra concept of an equilibrium that is not fixed, but on the move. Revolutions, violent or not, do blow societies apart – because they deliberately take the inherited system outside its physiological limits. The cybernetician will expect the politician to adopt one of two basic postures in the face of these systemic troubles. The first is to ignore the cybernetic facts and to pretend that the oscillations are due to some kind of wickedness which can be stamped out. The second is to undertake some kind of revolution, violent or not, to redesign the faulty instruments of government. It seems very clear to me as a matter of management science that if in these typical circumstances you do not like violence, then you should quickly embark on a pacific revolution in government. If you do not, then violence you will certainly get. Outstandingly it was Chile that embarked on this recommended course of pacific revolution. But in the wider world system, Chile’s experiment was observed as an oscillation to be stamped out.”

Henrietta Lacks rests today in an unmarked grave in the cemetery across the street from her family’s tobacco farm in Virginia. / photo by Rebecca Skloot

‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot [excerpt]
http://wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_henrietta/
http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123232331
“There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.” No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells — her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever —bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she — like most of us — would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons — an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall. Before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. “Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions — if not billions — of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice. Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse: “HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years.”"

The Way of All Flesh, by Adam Curtis

Knowledge or Consent
http://jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html
“Gey and his colleagues went on to develop a test, using HeLa cells, to distinguish between the many polio strains, some of which had no effect on the human body. With this information, Jonas Salk and his colleagues in Pittsburgh created a vaccine, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis established facilities for mass-producing the HeLa cells. They would use them to test the polio vaccine before its use in humans. In the meantime, Gey shared his resources. Researchers welcomed the gifts, allowing HeLa to grow. And though Henrietta never traveled farther than from Virginia to Baltimore, her cells sat in nuclear test sites from America to Japan and multiplied in a space shuttle far above the Earth. Still, David Lacks and his children hadn’t a clue. That is, until a day in 1975, 24 years after Henrietta’s death, when his daughter-in-law went to a friend’s house for dinner. Her friend’s brother-in-law looked across the table at Barbara. ”You know,” he said, “your name sounds so familiar.” He was a scientist who spent his days in a Washington laboratory. “I think I know what it is… I’ve been working with some cells in my lab; they’re from a woman called Henrietta Lacks. Are you related?” “That’s my mother-in-law,” Barbara whispered, shaking her head. “She’s been dead almost 25 years, what do you mean you’re working with her cells?” Actually, by that time, they were standard reference cells–few molecular scientists hadn’t worked with them. Since no one had called in the two decades after Henrietta’s death, the Lacks family got on the phone and rang Hopkins themselves. They did it at an opportune time. Henrietta’s cells, it turned out, had grown out of control. Some scientists thought her relatives were the only people who could help. Henrietta’s cells were, and still are, some of the strongest cells known to science–they reproduce an entire generation every 24 hours. “If allowed to grow uninhibited,” Howard Jones and his Hopkins colleagues said in 1971, “[HeLa cells] would have taken over the world by this time.” In 1974, a researcher by the name of Walter Nelson-Rees started what everyone called a nasty rumor: HeLa cells, he claimed, had infiltrated the world’s stock of cell cultures. No one wanted to believe him. For almost three decades researchers had done complex experiments on what they thought were breast cells, prostate cells, or placental cells, and suddenly, rumor had it they’d been working with HeLa cells all along.”

‘Lab Weeds’
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-133-a-conspiracy-of-cells.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Contamination
“Because of their adaptation to growth in tissue culture plates, HeLa cells are sometimes difficult to control. They have proven to be a persistent laboratory “weed” that contaminates other cell cultures in the same laboratory, interfering with biological research and forcing researchers to declare many results invalid. The degree of HeLa cell contamination among other cell types is unknown because few researchers test the identity or purity of already-established cell lines. It has been demonstrated that a substantial fraction of in vitro cell lines — approximately 10%, maybe 20% — are contaminated with HeLa cells. Stanley Gartler in 1967 and Walter Nelson-Rees in 1975 were the first to publish on the contamination of various cell lines by HeLa. Science writer Michael Gold wrote about the HeLa cell contamination problem in his book A Conspiracy of Cells. He describes Nelson-Rees’s identification of this pervasive worldwide problem — affecting even the laboratories of the best physicians, scientists, and researchers, including Jonas Salk — and many, possibly career-ending, efforts to address it. According to Gold, the HeLa contamination problem almost led to a Cold War incident: The USSR and the USA had begun to cooperate in the war on cancer launched by President Richard Nixon only to find that the exchanged cells were contaminated by HeLa. Rather than focus on how to resolve the problem of HeLa cell contamination, many scientists and science writers continue to document this problem as simply a contamination issue — caused not by human error or shortcomings but by the hardiness, proliferating, or overpowering nature of HeLa. Recent data suggest that cross-contaminations are still a major ongoing problem with modern cell cultures.”

New Species?: Helacyton gartleri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Helacyton_gartleri

“Due to their ability to replicate indefinitely, and their non-human number of chromosomes, HeLa was described by Leigh Van Valen as an example of the contemporary creation of a new species, Helacyton gartleri, named after Stanley M. Gartler, whom Van Valen credits with discovering “the remarkable success of this species.” His argument for speciation depends on three points:

• The chromosomal incompatibility of HeLa cells with humans.
• The ecological niche of HeLa cells.
• Their ability to persist and expand well beyond the desires of human cultivators.

It should be noted that this definition has not been followed by others in the scientific community, nor, indeed, has it been widely noted. As far as proposing a new species for HeLa cells, Van Valen proposes in the same paper the new family Helacytidae and the genus Helacyton. Recognition of Van Valen and Maiorana’s names, however, renders Homo and Hominidae paraphyletic because Helacyton gartleri is most closely related to Homo sapiens.

Cancer Don’t Stop
http://rebeccaskloot.com/book-special-features/henrietta-lacks-foundation/
http://smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
“It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henrietta’s relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the family’s DNA to make a map of Henrietta’s genes, so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which weren’t, to begin straightening out the contamination problem. Deborah’s brothers didn’t think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta’s family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can’t afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially.”

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation
http://rebeccaskloot.com/book-special-features/henrietta-lacks-foundation/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42653706@N00/sets/72157623243930457/
http://oprah.com/world/Excerpt-From-The-Immortal-Life-of-Henrietta-Lacks_1
“HeLa cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules and flew around the country in the breast pockets of researchers until they were growing in laboratories in Texas, Amsterdam, India, and many places in between. The Tuskegee Institute set up facilities to mass-produce Henrietta’s cells, and began shipping 20,000 tubes of HeLa—about six trillion cells—every week. And soon, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born. HeLa cells allowed researchers to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. Scientists exposed them to toxins, radiation, and infections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa into rats with weak immune systems, who developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. And if the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter—scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again. Meanwhile Henrietta’s children were consumed with questions: Were clones of their mother walking the streets of cities around the world? And if Henrietta was so vital to medicine, why couldn’t they afford health insurance?”

Pre-Industrial Land-Use
http://www.detroitagriculture.org/GRP_Website/Grown_In_Detroit.html
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/3_0_cool_projects.php
http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/policy.html
http://urbanfarming.org/homefarming.html

Downsizing
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/09/detroit-looks-at-downsizing-to-save-city/
Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking
“Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural. Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month. Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems. Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Some won’t go willingly. “I like the way things are right here,” said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown. Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can’t continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas. The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.”

More Modest View
http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/MayorsOffice/ContacttheMayor/tabid/1238/Default.aspx
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703503804575083781073108438.html
Mayor Plans to Use Census Tally Showing Decline as Benchmark in Overhaul
“This city is shrinking, and Mayor Dave Bing can live with that. The nation’s once-a-decade census, which gets under way next month, usually prompts expensive tally-building efforts by cities eager to maximize federal funding tied to the count. But this time, Mr. Bing is pushing the city to embrace the bad news. The mayor is looking to the diminished tally, down from 951,270 in 2000, as a benchmark in his bid to reshape Detroit’s government, finances and perhaps even its geography to reflect its smaller population and tax base. That means, in part, cutting city services and laying off workers. His approach to the census is a product of not only budget constraints but also a new, more modest view of the city’s prospects. “We’ve got to pick those core communities, those core neighborhoods” to sustain and preserve, he said at a recent public appearance, adding: “That’s something that’s possible here in Detroit.” Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bing, a Democrat first elected last year to finish the term of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hasn’t touted big development plans or talked of a “renaissance.” Instead, he is trying to prepare residents for a new reality: that Detroit—like the auto industry that propelled it for a century—will have to get smaller before it gets bigger again. With no high-profile census push, the city risks an undercount that would mean forgoing millions of dollars in federal funding. Nationwide, each person counted translates into about $1,000 to $1,200 in federal funding to municipal governments. But some community leaders see the hands-off approach as a sign the city’s leadership under Mr. Bing, a 66-year-old businessman and former basketball star, is prepared to face up to the depopulation problem and rethink Detroit’s future. “This is going to be hard to wrestle to the ground,” said Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Mich., a national philanthropy that has invested heavily in development projects aimed at salvaging the nicest remnants of the city. “He deserves enormous credit for leading the community into this.”

Economies of Scale
http://hantzfarmsdetroit.com/press.html
http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm
Can farming save Detroit?
“John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.” If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can’t afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000. That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction. “I think you should make pods,” Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods — or lakes, as he came to think of them — each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. “What if we had seven lakes in the city?” he wondered. “Would people develop around those lakes?”

photo by James Griffioen

To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings. Some of Hantz’s biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who’ve been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That’s a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation’s dependence on Big Ag. None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don’t generate a lot of cash (most don’t even try), but otherwise they’re great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves. That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn’t have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. “I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJFGEQRWxz8

City Services
http://instructables.com/id/Bicyle-Power-for-Your-Television,-Laptop,-or-Cell-/
http://treehugger.com/files/2010/01/pedal-power-in-detroit-green-gym-for-homeless.php

Pathways Of Desire
http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/trailmode.png
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.html
Streets With No Name / by James Griffioen / June 23, 2009
“This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed. In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go. Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.”

photo by James Griffioen

Days Now Slightly Shorter
http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-071
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aLAUn4Gy92ss
“The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a NASA scientist has said. Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects. “The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross said. “It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” said David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey. “As the ice skater’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.” The magnitude 9.1 Sumatran in 2004 that generated an Indian Ocean tsunami shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the axis by about 2.3 milliarcseconds, Gross has said.”

(Rotation Affected Much More by Wind)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-the-earthquake-that-s

Core Flux
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/dynamos2.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html
“The magnetic north pole moved little from the time scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year. In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 kilometers) a year. A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic-field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true North. Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid metal. This creates a “dynamo” that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction.”

Earth’s Inconstant Magnetic Field
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/Y2003/29dec_magneticfield.htm
“Every few years, scientist Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada goes hunting. He grabs his gloves, parka, a fancy compass, hops on a plane and flies out over the Canadian arctic. Not much stirs among the scattered islands and sea ice, but Newitt’s prey is there–always moving, shifting, elusive. His quarry is Earth’s north magnetic pole. Keeping track of the north magnetic pole is Newitt’s job. “We usually go out and check its location once every few years,” he says. “We’ll have to make more trips now that it is moving so quickly.” Earth’s magnetic field is changing in other ways, too: Compass needles in Africa, for instance, are drifting about 1 degree per decade. And globally the magnetic field has weakened 10% since the 19th century. They’ve also learned what happens during a magnetic flip. Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and during that time–contrary to popular belief–the magnetic field does not vanish. “It just gets more complicated,” says Glatzmaier. Magnetic lines of force near Earth’s surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti. Weird. But it’s still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects us from space radiation and solar storms. And, as a bonus, Tahiti could be a great place to see the Northern Lights…”

North Magnetic Pole Shifting Rapidly Toward Russia
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1215_051215_north_pole.html
“New research shows the pole moving at rapid clip—25 miles (40 kilometers) a year. Over the past century the pole has moved 685 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Arctic Canada toward Siberia, says Joe Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State. At its current rate the pole could move to Siberia within the next half-century. “It’s moving really fast,” he said. “We’re seeing something that hasn’t happened for at least 500 years.” The shift is likely a normal oscillation of the Earth’s magnetic field, Stoner said, and not the beginning of a flip-flop of the north and south magnetic poles, a phenomenon that last occurred 780,000 years ago. Such reversals have taken place 400 times in the last 330 million years, according to magnetic clues sealed in rocks around the world. Each reversal takes a thousand years or more to complete. “People like to think something special is happening in their lifetimes, but despite the dramatic changes, I don’t see any evidence of it,” Stoner said. “It’s probably just a normal wandering of the pole.” The north magnetic pole shifts constantly, in loops up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide each day. The recorded location of the pole is really an average of its daily treks, which are driven by fluctuations in solar radiation. The pole is currently at about 80º north latitude and 104º west longitude, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.”

Build Yr Own
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90947943
“The compass has been around since at least the 12th century, but scientists still don’t know exactly how the Earth generates the magnetic field that keeps a compass needle pointing north. But geophysicist Dan Lathrop is trying to find out — by building his own planet. Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning. At top speed the equator will whirl by at 80 miles an hour. “It was a little scary the first time we spun it up,” he says. Lathrop figures it can’t be too hard to get a magnetic field — after all, most planets in our solar system have one. But while nature has an easy time making magnetic fields, scientists do not. This is Lathrop’s third attempt.

If you could dig a deep hole, about 2,000 miles down, you would hit the outer core, which is probably made of liquid iron. That iron can conduct electricity. And if it flows in the right way, it can turn the Earth into what scientists call a dynamo, generating a self-sustaining magnetic field — in Earth’s case, producing one pole up in Canada and another down in Antarctica. Iron only melts at high temperatures, though, so Lathrop’s team will fill his sphere with a different metal — sodium. Sodium becomes liquid at stovetop temperatures and conducts electricity well, but it’s flammable. A sodium fire can’t just be put out with water. Water can actually make things worse — so Lathrop’s team has disabled the sprinkler system…”

Personnel Issue : Not All Pretend Astronauts Equally Serious
http://geekosystem.com/mars-desert-research-station-mdrs/
http://gizmodo.com/5476462/fake-mars-mission-befallen-by-real-drama

“The two-week simulations, including various experiments and equipment tests, take place at the Mars Desert Research Station, located outside Hanksville, Utah. The volunteers who participate are expected to take the matter very seriously—after all, our future Mars colony depends on it. But of course, some pretend Mars astronauts are more dedicated than other pretend Mars astronauts and this is where the trouble starts. After days of snits and snubs, the tension came to a head on February 15. In that day’s report, Commander Vermeulen explains: “…The growing frustration that after 9 days PE, Nora and Margaux are still not able to manage the Hab systems/ standard engineering reporting system (and even don’t consider this as a problem!), exploded during the lunch. The lack of dedication to the mission of some people overloads the others and it had to be spoken out. The problem was already there from the first day, when it came out that some people didn’t prepare anything for the mission, didn’t look at the manuals, which were send to them months ago and didn’t even prepare the tasks for their own role. The accusation into my direction that I didn’t brief enough about the systems was too much. Nicky almost exploded. Arjan reacted double: At one hand he couldn’t stop criticising the incompetence of some others during last week, but during the discussion he acted as if he was from Barcelona (don’t know anything). He has his own mission and own world…” The Commander’s Reports for the last days of the mission, which ended yesterday, obscure the interpersonal conflicts that paralyzed the crew. Only a few bloody noses are referenced, perhaps as physical manifestations of the crew’s frustrations.”

Boredom Practice, Minus Actual Danger
http://newscientist.com/article/dn18025-whats-the-point-of-a-fake-500day-mars-mission.html

“A few aspects cannot be simulated, however. There will be no radiation exposure or zero gravity, and if there is a real emergency during the simulation, volunteers will have the right to get out at any time. A study by Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, argues that such experiments lack some key attributes of real long-haul space flight, such as dangerous voyages through unknown territory and the impossibility of rescue. Suedfeld concludes that mission planners would better identify the psychological stresses likely to be experienced by Mars explorers by reading the diaries of explorers on long expeditions over sea and land in previous centuries. Some behavioural scientists feel Antarctic research stations or nuclear submarines offer better analogies to prolonged space flight. But although Antarctic outposts have the necessary elements of danger, confinement and isolation, they lack the high level of automation found in space flight. Nuclear submarine control rooms are more like spacecraft, but military secrecy puts them off limits for academic research. A better model may be the experience of astronauts aboard space stations orbiting Earth. Their stays have lasted up to 438 days. By and large, space station missions have gone without incident. However, NASA astronauts on a three-month mission to Skylab in 1973 went on strike for a day saying they felt overworked and unsupported by their ground crew. In 1982, two Soviet cosmonauts spent most of a 211-day flight in silence because they got on each other’s nerves. Three years later, a six-month Soviet mission was cut short when a cosmonaut had a nervous breakdown. Sexual harassment could also endanger a mission. In an eight-month space station simulation in 2000, a man twice tried to kiss a woman against her will. As a result, locks were installed between different crew compartments. Astronauts in orbit often express feelings of neglect by ground crews, in part because of lags in communication and perhaps also because of a need by astronauts to take out their frustrations on others. As a result, ground crews as well as astronauts now receive psychological training.”

Alone Time
http://newscientist.com/article/mg18925421.400-in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream.html
In space no one else can hear you scream at each other

“You and your fellow inmates are bound to have survived some hair-raising, potentially fatal crises, and everyone’s nerves will be in tatters. The pilot won’t talk to the engineer. And if that geologist looks at you and rolls his eyes one more time, you’ll punch his lights out. Despite the exciting goals, a crewed mission to Mars would mean enormous psychological stress. The centrepiece of each station in the Utah desert and in the outback in Southern Australia, is an 8-metre-wide cylindrical habitat, or hab. Crews of four to six live and work as if they were on Mars, testing reconnaissance robots and collecting rocks in mock spacesuits. During Eggins’s studies, the volunteers completed questionnaires to assess their interactions with others. This revealed that people tend to cluster into cliques that often put their own goals ahead of the whole mission’s objectives. This led to a mishap in a Utah simulation in 2003, when the group split into three teams. One stayed in the hab, and two went out on separate rover trips, returning at about the same time. One person in the second rover damaged his helmet and was theoretically leaking oxygen. “It was obvious to everybody that in theory, if this was really Mars, then this guy would die,” says Eggins. However, the first team insisted on getting into the hab first and told the others to wait their turn, she says: “The first team were not thinking at all in terms of the overall goal of the mission, just of their own rights and the distinct subgroup.” In another Utah simulation last summer, Eggins’s colleague Sheryl Bishop of the University of Texas in Galveston studied the differences between an all-male crew, who lived in the hab for two weeks, and an all-female crew who moved in for the following fortnight. Both teams performed well and were very productive, but they did differ. Personality surveys showed that several of the men scored low on “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness”, and the group’s behaviour echoed this. Every night, the women filed daily reports to mission control by the agreed time. But the men were persistently late. They said they preferred to use the time to explore outside on the buggies.”

Volunteering Not To Leave Earth
http://newscientist.com/article/dn9770

“More than 70 people have volunteered to be confined in a mock mission to Mars – for 520 days. It would be the longest simulation of its kind. The Institute of Medical and Biological Problems (IMBP) in Russia is undertaking the isolation study to learn more about the personal dynamics of long-duration space travel, according to Russian media reports. An actual round-trip mission to Mars could last about 30 months – about twice as long as this simulation. Five people will be eventually be selected for the study. They will spend 250 days on a simulated space trip to Mars. Then, three of the five will leave the mock spaceship for a simulated “landing on Mars” that will last 30 days. The five participants will then embark on a 240-day journey “back to Earth”. They will communicate with mission control by email. The simulations lack some of the appeal that draws people to spaceflight, so researchers may end up studying a different group of people than those who would actually fly on a space mission, he says. The IMBP has tried to minimise this issue by using cosmonauts and astronaut candidates in the past. And they are giving preference in this simulation to applicants who are doctors, biologists and engineers between the ages of 25 and 50. But Musson says a long-duration space mission may take a different type of astronaut than those who go on shorter trips to space. He points out that on the International Space Station and on Russia’s former Mir space station, some of the go-getter astronauts with multiple academic degrees found themselves bored by some of the mundane tasks onboard. Musson says someone with a more laidback personality might be better suited for a long-duration mission to Mars.”

Previously On Spectre :
Faking The Mars Landing
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/faking-the-mars-landing/
Faking The Mars Landing, pt 2
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/faking-the-mars-landing-pt-2/

Dunbar’s Number
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999879.ece
“We may be able to amass 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 actual friendships, a study has found. Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history. Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies — from neolithic villages to modern office environments. He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.”

The Social Brain
http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html
“Dunbar has gone through anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up over and over again. For example, he looked at 21 different hunger-gatherer societies around the world and found that the average number of people in each village was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. Over the years, through trial and error, military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb for the size of a functional fighting unit – 200 men. They have realized that it is quite difficult to make any larger a group than this to function as a unit without complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to insure loyalty and unity within the group. With a group of 150 or so, formalities are not necessary. Behavior can be controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this seems impossible.

Further is the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years, through trial and error, have realized that the maximum size for a colony should be, low and behold, 150 people. They’ve been following this rule for centuries. Every time a colony approaches this number, the colony is divided into two separate colonies. They have found that once a group becomes larger than that, “people become strangers to one another.” At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens that somehow changes the community seemingly overnight. At 150 the colony with spontaneously begin dividing into smaller “clans.” When this happens a new colony is formed.

Another good example of our hard wired social limits is Gore Associates, a privately held multimillion-dollar company responsible for creating Gore-Tex fabric and all sorts of other high tech computer cables, filter bags, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and medical products. What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it’s time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore – the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he said.”

A Functional Limit
http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligence/issue17/brainteaser.html
http://radio-weblogs.com/0107127/categories/networksAsTheOrganizationOfTheFuture/2003/02/22.html

Illusion Of Chaos
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/11/noboss.html
http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/24/29/22/index.html
“The classic Gore culture began in the basement of the home of Bill Gore, who left DuPont in 1958 to create his own enlightened version of the workplace. Gore built the company upon four core principles–fairness; freedom to encourage others to grow in knowledge, skill and responsibility; ability to honor one’s own commitments; and consultation with others before taking action that could affect the company “below the waterline.” In Gore’s model, associates communicate directly with one another and are accountable to their peers rather than bosses. Ideally, leaders in the company emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill or experience –”followship.” Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT and author of The Future of Work, describes Gore as a “miniature democracy. The way you become a manager is by finding people who want to work for you,” Malone says. The $1.84 billion company’s flat organizational structure makes it exceptionally nimble. “If someone has an idea for a new product, they don’t have to go up a hierarchy to find some boss to approve it,” says John Sawyer, chairman of the department of business administration at the University of Delaware. “Instead, they have to find peers in the organization who support the idea and will work with them. That open style of communication allows ideas to come up from the bottom.”

Living to 1,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4003063.stm
“This means that all parts of the project should be fully working in mice within just 10 years and we might take only another 10 years to get them all working in humans. When we get these therapies, we will no longer all get frail and decrepit and dependent as we get older, and eventually succumb to the innumerable ghastly progressive diseases of old age. We will still die, of course – from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera – but not in the drawn-out way in which most of us die at present. So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage. I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already. It is very complicated, because ageing is. There are seven major types of molecular and cellular damage that eventually become bad for us – including cells being lost without replacement and mutations in our chromosomes. Each of these things is potentially fixable by technology that either already exists or is in active development. The length of life will be much more variable than now, when most people die at a narrow range of ages (65 to 90 or so), because people won’t be getting frailer as time passes. The average age will be in the region of a few thousand years. If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000. And remember, none of that time would be lived in frailty and debility and dependence – you would be youthful, both physically and mentally, right up to the day you mis-time the speed of that oncoming lorry.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYpxRXlboQ

Longevity Escape Velocity
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/degrey07/degrey07_index.html
“The key conclusion of the logic I’ve set out above is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely, and that that rate is implausible for mice but entirely plausible for humans. If we can make rejuvenation therapies work well enough to give us time to make then work better, that will give us enough additional time to make them work better still, which will … you get the idea. This will allow us to escape age-related decline indefinitely, however old we become in purely chronological terms. I think the term “longevity escape velocity” (LEV) sums that up pretty well.”

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)
http://www.sens.org/
http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2009/11/30/vs.clinic.immortality.cnn
http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/strategies_for_engineered_negligible_senescence.cfm

Donate Or Compete
https://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=mj_donations_donate
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pagename=mj_mprize_how

Negligible Senescence
http://www.agelessanimals.org/
http://www.smart-publications.com/articles/MOM-guerin.php
“There are certain species of rockfish, whales, turtles, and other animals that are known to live for hundreds of years without showing any signs of aging—a phenomenon known to biogerontologists as “negligible senescence.” No one knows for sure how long these animals can live for, but we know that they can live for over two hundred years without showing any observed increase in mortality or any decrease in reproductive capacity due to age. Striking examples are a 109 year old female rockfish that was captured in the wild while swimming around with fertilized eggs, and a hundred-plus year old male whale that was harpooned while having sex.

Q: What is negligible senescence?
Guerin: Basically, this refers to an animal species that doesn’t show any significant signs of aging as it grows older. Unlike humans and most other mammals, there’s no decrease in reproduction after maturity. There’s also no notable increase in mortality rate with age, but that’s a little harder to prove. I’ve been talking with a statistician and he’s asking, how do you know? To do a study of this type would take a couple of hundred years to complete. But compared to us there’s no noted increase in mortality rate. I mean, if you are ninety years old, you’re much more likely to die next year then you are if you’re only twenty years old. But we don’t seem to see any increase in mortality with rockfish and several of these other animals over time.

Q: So we don’t know if these animals are simply aging more slowly or not at all? Since we have haven’t found any rockfish or whales that live for four hundred years, that might suggest that there is a certain limit on how long they can live.
Guerin: Well, we just do not know. We honestly do not know. It really is unfortunate that there is so little known in this field. Ecologists have never thought of this in the terms that gerontologists are now thinking of it in. But this other group of organisms, those that possess what Finch termed “negligible senescence,” they don’t seem to be showing the classical signs of aging that we’re used to. So, who is to say the longest they could live? As an example, in Finch’s book that was published in 1990, at that time the longest lived whale was—I believe it was a Blue Whale—something like 108 years old. That’s like, okay, well that’s not so startling. Humans live longer than that. We’re mammals. They’re mammals. We live longer. Then a study was done on bowhead whales, and they found that out of forty whales sampled, four of them were over a hundred years old, and one of them was over two hundred years old. And they didn’t die of old age either—they were harpooned.”

Lobsters Immortal?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11382976
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/400-pound-lobster.htm/
“In humans, telomerase levels decline later in life and are only found in some types of tissue, but in lobsters, telomerase is found in all types of tissue. That likely accounts for lobsters’ ability to grow throughout their lives. And because lobsters’ skeletons are on the outside and the molting process allows them to periodically shed their exoskeletons in favor of a new, larger one, their constant growth isn’t a problem. With a steady, evenly distributed supply of telomerase, lobsters don’t approach the Hayflick limit, which means that their cells stay pristine, young and dividing. Related animal species with vastly different life spans are also a point of interest. Conventional mice live only three years, but naked mole rats can live for 28. Other animals being studied include whales, bats, rockfish, zebrafish and clams, the oldest of which, a quahog clam, lived to be 220 years old. In many of these animals, the rate of telomere deterioration corresponds with their lifespan. The longer the telomeres last, the longer the animals live. Studying these creatures may tell us much about human aging and lead to treatments for aging-related diseases. If one day humans discover an important new treatment for cancer, it may be due to one of these creatures — or to the 200-pound lobster living peacefully in a tank at Boston University.”

Forever
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/20/184723/82
http://metafilter.com/88971/Nobody-Home
“For the past 21 years, across the limitless expanse of the North Pacific, a lonely whale has been singing, calling for a response. There has been none, and there never will. Picked up first in 1989 by NOAA hydrophones, the call is clearly a whale, but different than all other known species. Different enough that no other whale has responded in all this time. Hypotheses vary, but the mental image is definitely haunting.”

Wikileaks Develops New Business Model, Goes On Strike
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8490867.stm
“WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that allows people to publish uncensored information anonymously, has suspended operations owing to financial problems. Its running costs including staff payments are $600,000, but so far this year it has raised just $130,000. WikiLeaks has established a reputation for publishing information that traditional media cannot. The website claims to be non-profit and relies on donations. A statement on its front page says it is funded by “human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public”.

Labor Dispute
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/29/wikileaks-shut-down
“Its tremendous success has meant the site has often struggled under the volume of users. It has faced down governments, investment banks and the famously litigious Church of Scientology but paying its operating costs has proved its undoing. As of today instead of reading government secrets and details of corporate malfeasance all visitors to the site will see is an appeal for cash. The site won Index on Censorship’s 2008 freedom of expression award because it’s an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists. But Wikileaks is not just a tool for journalists, it allows ordinary Kenyans to read a confidential report detailing the billions their former president allegedly siphoned from the country’s coffers. Its repository includes controversial military documents including the US rules of engagement in Iraq and an operating manual issued to army officers in Guantánamo Bay. It has put corporations on notice that the costs of unethical behaviour are immeasurable in PR terms because it amplifies the Streisand effect, the social media phenomenon that punishes those who use the courts to suppress or censor information, by ensuring it has a much wider reach.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o2ZGk1djTU

Overworked, Undervalued
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Notable_leaks
http://wikileaks.org/
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon. We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”

Support Technically
“Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”

Support Legally
“Individuals or organizations wishing to donate lawyer time write to wl-legal[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”

Going Galt
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3567-en-wikileaks_release_10.mp4
http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-economy-of-wikileaks/

Q. So, you strike?
A. Yes, it’s similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give free and important information to the world every
day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.
Q. Do you urgently need money?
A. We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.

Ending in Pay Settlement: Leaked Data Back Up, For Now
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/wikileaks-meets-cash-goal
Wikileaks Meets Its (Minimum) Cash Goal
“The whistleblowing site Wikileaks has apparently raised the money it needs to continue operating, for the time being, according to a message the organization sent out Wednesday night on Twitter.
“Achieved min. funraising [sic] goal; we’re back fighting for another year, even if we have to eat rice to do it,” read the tweet.”

Secure Anonymized Upload [Disclaimer]
https://secure.wikileaks.org/

YOU Submit a document for us to publish and, inorder to maximize its impact, distribute amongst our network of investigative journalists, human rights workers, lawyers and other partners.

WE will publish and keep published the document you submitted, provided it meets the submission criteria. Your data is stored decentralized, encrypted and as a preserved historic record, accessible in full by the public. The information you submit will be cleaned by us to not be technically traceable to your PDF printing program, your word installation, scanner, printer. We also anonymize
any information on you at a very early stage of the WikiLeaks network, and our services neither know who you are nor do they keep any information about your visit. We will never cooperate with anyone trying to identify you as our source. In fact we are legally bound not to do so, and any investigation into you as our source is a crime in various countries and will be prosecuted.

Zero Rupee Note
http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/paying-zero-public-services
“In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. According to Vijay Anand, the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system. Once they realize that they are not alone, they also realize that this battle is not unbeatable. Then, a path opens up—a path that can pave the way for relatively simple ideas like the zero rupee notes to turn into a powerful social statement against petty corruption.”"

5th Pillar
http://india.5thpillar.org/
http://5thpillar.blogspot.com/

Zero Currency (Select by Country)
http://zerocurrency.org/
“Corruption in the form of bribery is prevalent throughout the world. The zero currency note in your country’s currency is a tool to help you achive the goal of zero corruption. The note is a way for any human being to say NO to corruption without the fear of facing an encounter with persons in authority. Next time someone asks you for a bribe, just take your country’s zero currency note and hand it to them. This will let the other person know that you refuse to give or take any money in order to perform services required by law or to give or take money to do something illegal.”

Corruption Perceptions Index
http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009

Institutional Corruption
http://blip.tv/file/3120038
http://change-congress.org/about/

Google Missing Persons Spreadsheet
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/

iReport Search By Name
http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=381628

Reuters EIS
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/126373176384.htm
“Emergency Information Service is exclusively operating for and on behalf of earthquake survivors, using local languages, French and Creole. The service is free and global.”

Relief Efforts
http://www.trackernews.net/search/?s=HAITI
http://www.cidi.org/incident/haiti-10a/
http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti

Health + Sanitation Guides (Kreyol)
http://www.hesperian.org/publications_download.php
http://www.hesperian.info/assets/Where_There_is_no_Doctor_Creole.pdf
http://www.hesperian.info/assets/hesperian_wwhnd_haitian%20creole_2000.pdf

Learn Kreyol
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/?lang=ht
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Creole-French-English_Phrase_Dictionary_Wiki

Technical Volunteer Registry
http://dex.cidi.org/
http://www.ewb-usa.org/haiti.php

Importable Infrastructure : Who’s Where, Doing What
http://haiti-orgs.sahanafoundation.org/prod/or/organisation
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc108?OpenForm&emid=EQ-2010-000009-HTI&rc=2

Conditions
http://wfplogistics.org/haiti-earthquake-2010

Crisis Mapping
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/main
http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/

Crisis Commons [White Hat]
http://haiti.crisiscommons.org/
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake

Network Relief Kit (NRK)
http://www.nethope.org/impact/programs/
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol19/?pg=46&pm=1
“NetHope members who have been active in our relief efforts firmly believe that NGOs on the ground require a lightweight “NetHope ICT Kit” they can carry in their baggage to provide instant communications from Day 1 onward. This kit must have the following features:”

U.S. Stops Deporting Haitians
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0113/Haiti-earthquake-US-stops-deporting-Haitians

Jubilee Act HR 4405 / Drop The Debt
http://www.one.org/us/actnow/drophaitiandebt/index.html
http://www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee-act.html

Inflatable Hospital En Route
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=4165
Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince

No Medicines, Baby Born On Street

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW1VUgH9g2s

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE :

HASTILY FORMED RELIEF NETWORKS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/08/17/strong-angel-iii-hastily-formed-networks/
TXTBANKNG THE UNBANKED
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/sms-banking-in-kenya/
ONE CELLPHONE PER CHILD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/one-cellphone-per-child
KATRINA 2.0
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/katrina-20/
R U IN JAIL?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/r-u-in-jail/

….long before the earthquake….

Haitians Eating Mud (cont.)

Buying Cooking-Dirt On Credit [Video]
http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/02/19/dirt-poor-haitians-eat-cookies-made-of-mud/4120/

Geophagy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_eating
“Geophagy is the practice of eating earthy or soil-like substances such as clay, and chalk, in order to obtain essential nutrients such as sulfur and phosphorus from the soil. It is closely related to pica, a classified eating disorder in the DSM-IV characterized by abnormal cravings for nonfood items. The many possible health benefits of geophagy remain under study and are much debated. Many scientists believe that it is only harmful, while others argue that there may be adaptive benefits to the practice, since humans and animals alike have engaged in it for thousands of years.”

Butter-Flavored
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=b7ed2a4ccb7fdae5294a5dbad78a45306d828d99
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html
‘In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute. “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”’

Acacia Self-Defense
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717361.200-antelope-activate-the-acacias-alarm-system.html
Antelope activate the acacia’s alarm system
“Acacia trees pass on an ‘alarm signal’ to other trees when antelope browse on their leaves, according to a zoologist from Pretoria University. Wouter Van Hoven says that acacias nibbled by antelope produce leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the browsers, and emit ethylene into the air which can travel up to 50 yards. The ethylene warns other trees of the impending danger, which then step up their own production of leaf tannin within just five to ten minutes. Van Hoven made his discovery when asked to investigate the sudden death of some 3000 South African antelope, called kudu, on game ranches in the Transvaal. He noticed that giraffe, roaming freely, browsed only on one acacia tree in ten, avoiding those trees which were downwind. Kudu, which are fenced in on the game ranches, have little other than acacia leaves to eat during the winter months. So the antelope continue to browse until the tannin from the leaves sets off a lethal metabolic chain reaction in their bodies.”

Interspecies Mutualism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7179880.stm
“It is all because of the Acacia’s mutually beneficial relationship with a biting ant. Together they fend off Africa’s big grazing mammals; but it is these very antagonists that are needed to keep the plant-insect team working in concert. The whistling thorn tree (Acacia drepanolobium) and the biting ant (Crematogaster) that lives on it form a relationship, evolved over many millennia, in which both species co-operate and in turn benefit from each other. When this “mutualism” is working well, Acacia trees provide ants with swollen thorns, which serve as nesting sites; and nectar, which the ants collect from the bases of Acacia leaves. In return for this investment, ants protect the tree from browsing mammals by aggressively swarming against anything that disturbs the tree.”

Bribes + Repellents
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8383577.stm
“That is the plus side for the plants. But being inhabited by aggressive insects could make one important aspect of a plant’s life difficult – flowering. One clever approach by the plant is a food “bribe”. Acacias produce structures called beltian bodies on the leaf tips. These, Dr Raine explains, are nutritious structures produced by the plant to feed its resident colony of ant-guards. But [when in bloom], it is a case of chemical warfare. Floral volatile compounds can act as signals – drawing in pollinators such as bees and hummingbirds in with their irresistible aromas. To the ants, however, they are far from irresistible. “The flowers seem to produce chemicals that are repellent to the ants,” said Dr Raine. “They release these particularly during the time when they’re producing lots of pollen, so the ants are kept off the flowers.” The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical “mimics” of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate. “We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive” he explained. “The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they’re being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat.” Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.”

U.S. Supreme Court vs ‘Flying’ Asian Carp
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/Motion-Petition-Brief_305173_7.pdf
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/12/michigan-sues-illinois-in-supreme-court.php

Enforcement Issues

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcQ56OpxNE

Great Lakes Infected?
http://www.fws.gov/midwest/Fisheries/hot-asian-carp-12-09.html
http://www.asiancarp.org/rapidresponse/greatlakesthreat.htm

Laws Of Nature
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gPBBiKJKfp1MbkPXxJCnNjnZCCrQD9CNR67O0
Michigan files suit in US high court over Asian carp
“Michigan asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to close shipping locks near Chicago to prevent Asian carp from invading the Great Lakes and endangering their $7 billion fishery. State Attorney General Mike Cox filed a lawsuit Monday with the nation’s highest court against Illinois, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. They operate canals and other waterways that open into Lake Michigan. Bighead and silver carp from Asia have been detected in those waterways after migrating north in the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades. Scientists say DNA found north of the barrier suggest at least some of the carp have gotten through and may be within 6 miles of Lake Michigan. If so, the only other obstacle between them and the lake are shipping locks, which open frequently to grant passage for cargo vessels. Fifty members of Congress last week joined environmental groups in urging closure of the locks — the same demand made in Michigan’s lawsuit. “The Great Lakes are an irreplaceable resource,” Cox, who is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Michigan, said at a news conference in Detroit. “Thousands of jobs are at stake and we will not get a second chance once the carp enter Lake Michigan.” He likened the fish to “nuclear bombs.” Cox went directly to the Supreme Court because it handles disputes between states. It asks the court to immediately order them closed, and to create new barriers to prevent the carp from entering the ship canal from nearby waterways during floods. “The carp invasion is a good textbook example of irreparable harm,” law professor Noah Hall said. “It’s unfortunate that there would be an assumption that this would make some positive resolution come sooner than is truly feasible,” Metropolitan Water Reclamation District spokeswoman Jill Horist said. “Even if the locks were closed there’s still a variety of ways for DNA or Asian carp to enter Lake Michigan.” Messages left with the Army Corps of Engineers seeking comment were not returned.”

Rivers Preventively Poisoned
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chicago-river-poisoned-to
Chicago river poisoned to block feared Asian carp
“Two electrical barriers in the canal were erected in 2002 and 2006 to shock any fish, particularly carp, that try to swim up the canal to Lake Michigan. The newer barrier is being switched off to perform maintenance on it. To give themselves a window to complete the task and keep any carp at bay below the barrier, authorities dumped into the canal more than 2,000 pounds (900 kg) of the natural poison rotenone that prevents fish gills from absorbing oxygen. The toxin, which is used as a broad-spectrum insecticide and pesticide, kills fish and freshwater snails but does not harm other animals. It dissipates within two days, though authorities planned to introduce a neutralizing agent to speed up the process. Notre Dame University scientists recently detected carp DNA on the lake side of the barriers, which could indicate the carp have already passed them and the effort is either too little or too late. Fishermen have been asked to look out for the invasive carp on the lake side of the barriers. The DNA discovery led some environmentalists to call for river locks to be shut and ask for permanent separation of the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has indicated her state might demand locks be closed permanently.”

Previously On Spectre : Cloned Aquarium Plant Takes Over Mediterranean
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/hacking-nature-for-salvation-and-profit/
Viking Mice (+ Mummy Lice)
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/viking-mice/
Bad Moves In Central Planning : Death To Sparrows
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/spectre-classics-bad-moves-in-central-planning/

Carp Bow-Hunting
http://carpbusters.com/proteams_riversedge.shtml

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEIu4l4mNVQ

Dystopian Ecotourism [Wear A Helmet]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdgkvlA9DHU

Invasive Species Primer
http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=3743
Proposal To Add Carp To State Prison Menus
http://www.sphere.com/nation/article/invasive-asian-carp-inspire-lawsuits-extreme-archery/19296294

Louisiana Gov’t Cajun/Jerk Cooking Show
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi020509.html
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/sports-164/126199962984530.xml&storylist=louisiana
“The fish are easy to identify. They have small, downward-facing eyes, a stout body and protruding lower jaw. Silver carp commonly exceed 20 pounds. Record catches have approached 100 pounds, Thomas said. But the silver carp is best known for an unusual and dangerous survival behavior. When startled by the sound of a boat motor, it attempts to flee danger by jumping skyward, frequently hitting boats and people. The action has earned them the nickname, “flying carp,” Massimi said. “As you can imagine, getting hit by a 50 or 60 pound carp can cause serious problems,” Massimi said. The fish have been known to cause boating accidents, black eyes, bruises and more severe injuries. Trying to promote annoying invasive species as a tasty treat is a worthwhile tactic, but it might be difficult to pull off, Massimi said. Since the fish eat algae, they don’t tend to bite on hooks. Chapman, however, said that might make the fish a more exciting target for anglers. “You can go bowfishing or wait for them to jump in the boat,” Chapman said. “Commercial fishermen catch them in hoop-and-gill nets in Illinois.” Massimi, who tried Chapman and Thomas’ carp recipes at a recent state coastal meeting said the fish are delicious and taste like “fresh catfish.” Silver and bighead carp have moist, white mild flesh, he said. The larger carp yield meaty fillets. But their unusual bone structure does make them difficult to clean, a drawback that can make fishermen wary. In the video, Chapman demonstrates his unique cleaning methods. He also demonstrates three cooking methods: blackened fillets, grilled fillets and a fried, bone-in preparation he calls ‘flying carp wings’. “You eat the fish off the bone, just like a chicken wing,” Massimi said. The fish, regardless of how they are captured or cook, do need to be put on ice quickly, he said, because they spoil easily.”

Recipes (More Please)
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi020509.html
http://www.iisgcp.org/AsianCarp/recipes_chapman.pdf
From The Kitchens of Duane Chapman, USGS Fish Biologist, and Rob Maher, head of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources commercial fishing program, with Mike Hooe of the Illinois Division of Fisheries

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1NVUV8yhmU

Synanthropes
http://beefheart.com/walker/lyrics/crow/icecreamforcrow.htm
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10007459o-2000331777b,00.htm
“My new favourite word is synanthropy – the study and practice of creating symbiotic relationships between people and animals. Metafilter pointed me at A Vending Machine For Crows, a project by polymath techie Joshua Klein that aims to put some of the hundreds of millions of dropped coins back in circulation. It does this by training crows to realise that if they find coins and take them to the machine, they’ll get food. The benefits of this idea are manifold. Klein posits that if you can get a few crows trained, then the idea will spread naturally throughout the population – and that means that mostly, human intervention can be restricted to seeding the idea and then leaving enough machines around. That makes it very economical – especially if the crows remain unaware of the true market value of the coinage they find. Although I’m sure that economics will take over if the idea catches on; if it’s profitable for the machine operators, then rival devices will appear offering better deals and a wider range of treats – and I do hope crows really are partial to ice cream. Is it perhaps entirely smart to introduce intelligent non-humans into our economy? If this catches on,avian mugging will spread from the seagulls in no time flat.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqFQU7zn4kQ

Coconuts As Portable Shelter
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2771822.htm
“Scientists at the Melbourne Museum have recorded the first case of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The veined octopus selects, stacks, transports and assembles coconut shells as portable armour. “It comes at a cost, carrying these shells in this awkward way and it’s a fantastic example of complex behaviours in what we consider the lower life forms,” he said. They watched the octopuses dig out coconut shells from the ocean floor and empty the shells of mud using jets of water. Dr Finn says it is not unusual for octopuses to live inside coconuts but how it uses the shells is unique. “It gathers them together, it stacks them like bowls, covers its whole body over bowls, lifts them up and then trundles along on its arm tips until a predator comes or there’s a threat,” he said. “Then it closes them over like a ball and hides inside.”"

Crow Cam
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/movies/crowcamS1_high.mov
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008132804.htm

Betty
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/introduction.shtml
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tool_manufacture.shtml
“In the first experiment, the crows were given a choice between a hooked and a straight piece of wire, and could only get the bucket if they used the hook. On the fifth trial, one of our subjects (“Abel”) removed the hooked wire, leaving the other subject (“Betty”) with only the straight piece. After trying to use this unsuccessfully, she wedged one end of it under a piece of sticky tape and pulled the other end with her beak – creating a hook! – which she then used to retrieve the bucket. When tested with only straight wire, she repeatedly bent it into hooks, using a variety of techniques; it is the first time any animal has been seen to make a new tool for a specific task, without an extended period of trial-and-error learning.”

Flocks Show Cultural Adaptation
http://www.josh.is/projects/index.php
http://www.ted.com/speakers/joshua_klein.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

[ted id=261]

Teaching Crows (To Teach Other Crows) To Collect Trash, For Peanuts
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14Ideas-section4B-t-003.html
“Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. To Klein, the machine demonstrates the value of cooperating with “synanthropes” — animals that have adapted seamlessly to human environments. “Rather than just killing off a species, why not see if they can do something useful for us, so we can all live in close proximity?” he said. To pursue his research, he founded the Synanthropy Foundation this year. Someday, he hopes, similar techniques may allow us to train rats to sort our garbage for us.”

Previously On Spectre : Effort To Corrupt Birds Pays Off
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/effort-to-corrupt-birds-pays-off/

Mutually Beneficial Synanthropy In Practice

Sniffer Rats + Landmines
http://www.apopo.org/bringing_minefields_to_the_rats.php
http://socyberty.com/issues/unexploded-landmines-call-for-the-herorats/
“Bart Weegens, from Belgium has found a low-technology answer to the continuing issue of unexploded mines. An army of sniffer rats would save hundreds if not thousands of human lives. Why these rats though? As well as having the highly developed sense of smell important in this work they are easy to tame, breed and train. Plus they are too light to detonate a mine by themselves if they step on it.”

Public Shares Offered
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B01Z920091201
“In Somalia’s main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate. The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from ransoms and a deployment by foreign navies in the area has only appeared to drive the attackers to hunt further from shore. It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations — and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments. One wealthy former pirate named Mohammed took Reuters around the small facility and said it had proved to be an important way for the pirates to win support from the local community for their operations, despite the dangers involved. “Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,” Mohammed said. “The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials … we’ve made piracy a community activity.”

“Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output,” said Mohamed Adam, the town’s deputy security officer. “The district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools.” Haradheere’s “stock exchange” is open 24 hours a day and serves as a bustling focal point for the town. As well as investors, sobbing wives and mothers often turn up there seeking news of male relatives missing in action. Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. “I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,” she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. “I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the ‘company’.”"

Pirate Democracy
http://www.peterleeson.com/Opportunism_and_Org_Under_the_Black_Flag.pdf
http://www.peterleeson.com/The_Calculus_of_Piratical_Consent.pdf
http://www.peterleeson.com/The_Invisible_Hook.pdf
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/pirate-economics-101-a-qa-with-invisible-hook-author-peter-leeson/
“Q: In the book, you write that pirates had set up their own early versions of constitutional democracy, complete with separation of powers, decades before the American Revolution. Was that only possible because they were outlaws, operating entirely outside the control of any government?
A: That’s right. The pirates of the 18th century set up quite a thoroughgoing system of democracy. The reason that the criminality is driving these structures is because they can’t rely on the state to provide those structures for them. So pirates, more than anyone else, needed to figure out some system of law and order to make it possible for them to remain together long enough to be successful at stealing.
Q: So did these participatory, democratic systems give merchant sailors an incentive to join pirate crews, because it meant they were freer among pirates than on their own ships?
A: The sailors had more freedom and better pay as pirates than as merchantmen. But perhaps the most important thing was freedom from the arbitrariness of captains and the malicious abuses of power that merchant captains were known to inflict on their crews. In a pirate democracy, a crew could, and routinely did, depose their captain if he was abusing his power or was incompetent.”

Pirate Utopias
http://books.google.com/books?id=SJEg0p4RCP4C&dq
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html

The Breakaway Semi-Functioning-Democracy Of Somaliland
http://www.somalilandgov.com/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1679_287/ai_n27865671

http://gizmodo.com/5413109/the-burj-dubai-just-cant-stop-getting-struck-by-lightning

Dubai Requests Jubilee
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574557453620655942.html
Dubai World Seeks Debt Standstill
“This debt-laden city-state said Wednesday it would restructure its largest corporate entity, Dubai World, a conglomerate spanning real estate and ports, and announced a six-month standstill on the group’s debt. The government said its Financial Support Fund, a fund set up to manage Dubai’s debt earlier this year, would start to assess and valuate the extent of the restructuring required. As part of that assessment, it said officials intend to ask lenders for a debt ‘standstill’.”

Debt Insurance Prices Soar
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574561850829787002.html

A Bad Omen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/03/AR2009120303607.html
“No other country built a ski resort in a desert. No other country constructed an archipelago of 300 artificial islands, complete with a man-made reef colonized by parrot fish. But even if Dubai is a gaudy outlier — a sort of Donald Trump of a nation — the bankruptcy of its flagship investment company, Dubai World, holds a warning for others. The nonchalance with which global financial markets have reacted is not reassuring in the least. The lack of alarm is alarming.

Start with the size of the Dubai bankruptcy. Most analysts reckon the emirate will end up defaulting on more than $30 billion. That’s up from the $26 billion advertised at Dubai World but perhaps less than half of the city-state’s accumulated $80 billion debt. Dubai’s bust will be larger than South Korea’s 1998 debt restructuring, which involved $22 billion worth of loans, and not much smaller than Russia’s default that year (which affected loans worth $40 billion). The South Korean and Russian traumas spread panic around the world. Nowadays, investors yawn at losses that don’t run into the hundreds of billions. This is a touch complacent.

The threat of sovereign defaults, disowned state-company debts and continuing commercial real estate troubles comes amid a recovery that is extraordinarily precarious. It is based on fiscal stimulus from governments, but government debt ensures that this game has to stop at some point. It is based on the printing of money by central banks, but a combination of political backlash and inflation fears will eventually close down this game also. To rescue the global economy, governments have exacerbated the flaws responsible for making the system weak. China has too much export capacity; it is building more. China has an undervalued currency; it is weakening further. Meanwhile, the United States has a low national savings rate and is home to financial behemoths that are “too big to fail.” But the U.S. government has been forced to add to the public debt and broker consolidation in the banking business.

Given these troubles, Dubai should have been a wake-up call. Instead, global stock markets have risen since last weekend. We are witnessing the sort of rally that chart-watching traders know well: the kind where investors shrug off most bad news, so you might as well jump on the bandwagon. When this mentality sets in, prices inevitably rise too far. At the end of the trend there is usually a bubble.

Abandoned Mercedes Auctions
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/world/1194811622205/index.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/the_gulf/article5663618.ece
Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park
“For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home. Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans. Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars – four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes – had keys left in the ignition. Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached to the windscreen. “Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.””

Theme Party Proposal [Field Manual]
http://www.dareland.com/field_manual.pdf

1st Earth Battalion
http://www.firstearthbattalion.org/
http://www.firstearthbattalion.com/
http://www.neweartharmy.com/

Origins
http://firstearthbattalion.com/frequently-asked-questions/what-is-the-first-earth-battalion-and-how-did-it-originate.php
“Post Vietnam 1978 was a time when military morale and enrollment were at an all time low. Army leaders called upon officers to develop needed creative approaches to dealing with this challenge. They were encouraged to fully explore the Army’s Be All That You Can Be philosophy. In response, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon created the First Earth Battalion, that collected new technologies to support a conceptual prototype of the soldier of the future. Channon was inspired by the human potential and advanced human performance movements and drew many of his ideas from these fields and from the time he spent at Esalen Institute. Channon delivered his ideas through his illustrated field manual, Evolutionary Tactics, which was published by the Army in 1978. The manual was modeled after the popular Whole Earth Catalog with illustrations of advanced human performance skills. It is credited with kick-starting a very creative surge of activity in the U.S. Army. Army commanders adopted the elements that served them. There was no one cookie-cutter solution. Original copies have become something of collector’s item.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKgilR4rIY0

Spoiler Alert
http://www.firstearthbattalion.org/?q=node/96
A viewers guide to the Goats movie : True or False?
BY John B. Alexander / U.S. Army (retired)
“Facts and Fiction
- Remote Viewing – REAL- and was a 20 year official program
- Use of Remote Viewing in Gen Dozier kidnapping by Red Brigade – REAL
- Concern about Soviet psychic research – REAL
- JEDI projects – REAL – but ad hoc (I had one of them with multi-agencies)
- Spoon bending – REAL – was taught to hundreds
- Cloud busting –REAL – though never as fast as done by Clooney
- Computer crashing – REAL – incident did happen
- Fire walking -REAL
- New Age exploration – REAL
- Running into walls – NOT REAL (is the opening scene of the movie)
- Use of LSD – not only NO, BUT HELL NO
- Hamster staring –ATTEMPTED – by Guy Savelli (a civilian martial artist)
- Goat Lab – REAL – used to train medics
- Goats – Hit by martial artists – It did die hours later
- Goats – Staring – no credible evidence to support this allegation
- Dim mak – PROBABLY REAL – supported by physical evidence
- References to a hollow army –REAL – post Vietnam was a traumatic period”

New Earth Army
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/05/1
The armies of the world should unite to save Earth
BY Jim Channon / 5 November 2009
“It is often overlooked, but the Marshall Plan executed after the second world war may have been the largest humanitarian exercise in the history of the planet. The allied armies decided to put Europe back together. Military forces had, and have, the tools and proper organisation to help reconstruct the very things they have destroyed. The army would properly reforest and clean the fresh water sources. The navy would control over-fishing and recycle the ocean waste. The marines would tend the shorelines and restore the coral reefs and wetland areas. Then the air forces would sense the environment from above and detect polluters while also having the instant mass transport of rescue villages for all the displaced refugees likely to surface during climate change. The many national guard units would reconstruct the countryside with the assistance of the youth to bring nature back to her fullness for a more decentralised and sustainable world. The internet will become our worldwide exchange system, and former power centres will just be support services. The world is already one culture. Countries are obsolete and have been for 30 years.”

Jedi Training
http://wisdomatwork.com/WisdomAtWork/JEDIWARRIOR.html
Special Forces of the Mind
“In 1982 we were approached by the US. Army to design and direct the “Ultimate Warrior Training Program”, AKA “Jedi Warrior,” for two A Teams of Special Forces, Green Berets. This six month-long, full-time program came about through the efforts of a number of concerned and high-ranking officers who were inspired by the vision of the First Earth Battalion. Our advisors and collaborators ranged from Vietnam veterans and respected military leaders, to leading martial artists, noted researchers like Elmer Green from the Menninger Foundation, Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, and Nobel Peace Laureate, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. By the time the program began, we had woven the best of our own experience with the insights of many others to deliver what Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, and Esquire editor George Leonard, once called, “the most intensive leadership and human development program to be offered in modern times.” Our advanced Biocybernaut training combined technologies of biofeedback, neurofeedback, cyberphysiology, and contemplative inner methods of mastery drawn from the vast array of contemplative science traditions. In our lab the soldiers developed the skill and confidence necessary to sense and control many previously unconscious physiological functions: they learned to recognize and control muscle tension, to control blood circulation in order to keep their hands warm in cold environments, manage the intensity and physiology of their responses to stress. For many visiting dignitaries to the base, the Jedi Biocybernaut Lab became a first stop on the tour of the base, where they learned that it was actually possible to recognize and control the level of their blood pressure. The lab included the world’s first multiple-synchrony brainwave feedback system, which we helped to design, in order to teach up to sixteen people at a time to “synchronize” their brain waves in order to move toward a team resonance and flow state of deep attunement to each other’s inner state of being.”

Battlefield Acupuncture
http://www.n5ev.com/battlefield_acupuncture.htm
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2008-12-11/news/0812100207_1_battlefield-acupuncture-pain-with-acupuncture-traditional-chinese-acupuncture

C.I.A. In-House Acid Tests
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0802130623/bizarrehistorica
http://www.historyhouse.com/c/in_history/?lsd
“Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, has been a sacrament of artists, would-be prophets, and other such social chaff since the 1960s. Invented in 1938 by chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann while looking for an analeptic (circulatory stimulant), he found it had no effect on lab animals and forgot all about it. Years later, on the fateful day 16 of April, 1953, he accidentally absorbed a little through his fingertips and went flying on the first acid trip. By then the CIA had a ten-year-old program running, looking for interrogation drugs and truth serums. They’d played with caffeine, barbiturates, peyote, and marijuana. Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain, “agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other’s drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a … colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives…. The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party … a Security memo writer… concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did ‘not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.’”

Previously On Spectre : Voice-To-Skull Technologies
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/voice-to-skull-technologies/
“These People Haven’t Heard Heavy Metal”
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/02/13/these-people-havent-heard-heavy-metal/
Cary Grant’s Thoughts On LSD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/cary-grants-thoughts-on-lsd/

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/cambyses-lost-army-images.html
http://news.discovery.com/videos/archaeology-ancient-lost-army-found.html
http://www.archeologiaviva.tv/tv/video/80

Vanished 2,500 Year Old Persian Army Found In Desert?
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/cambyses-army-remains-sahara.html
Bones found in Egyptian desert may be remains of Cambyses’ army
“The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C. According to Herodotus, Cambyses sent the soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt. After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again. “A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale. Now, two top Italian archaeologists claim to have found striking evidence that the Persian army was indeed swallowed in a sandstorm. Twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni are already famous for their discovery 20 years ago of the ancient Egyptian “city of gold” Berenike Panchrysos. Presented recently at the archaeological film festival of Rovereto, the discovery is the result of 13 years of research and five expeditions to the desert. According to Castiglioni, from El Kargha the army took a westerly route: “Since the oasis on the other route were controlled by the Egyptians, the army would have had to fight at each oasis.” To test their hypothesis, the Castiglioni brothers did geological surveys along that alternative route. They found desiccated water sources and artificial wells made of hundreds of water pots buried in the sand. Such water sources could have made a march in the desert possible. At the end of their expedition, the team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that would have emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area. Indeed, they found a mass grave with hundreds of bleached bones and skulls. “We learned that the remains had been exposed by tomb robbers and that a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold to American tourists,” Castiglioni said. A number of Persian arrow heads and a horse bit, identical to one appearing in a depiction of an ancient Persian horse, also emerged.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ENizFYf96Y

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzsi1LFZV4w

Buried Alive
http://mitchtestone.blogspot.com/2008/10/lost-army-of-cambyses-redux.html
“The primary source for the tale of Cambyses and his lost army is the ancient Greek traveller and historian Herodotus, an intrepid man who travelled all over Egypt just 75 years after the Persian invasion. Herodotus followed in Cambyses’ footsteps and recorded the local tales and histories of the invader. Unfortunately his impartiality is questionable; his Histories slander Cambyses remorselessly, painting him as a despot, madman and general ne’er-do-well. According to Herodotus, an army of 50,000 men was ordered to ‘enslave the Ammonians and burn the oracle of Zeus’. Led by guides, the army set off into the desert, reaching ‘the city of Oasis’, known to the Greeks as ‘The Isles of the Blest’ (modern-day Kharga), seven days’ march to the west. After this, they were never seen again, although the Siwans themselves were somehow able to give a rough account of what happened next. If Herodotus is right, the Persian army met a bleak end. The Western Desert is one of the hardest places in the world to be looking for lost relics. It is vast, covering about two-thirds of modern-day Egypt: an area of 680,000 square kilometres (263,000 square miles), equal to the combined size of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland. The conditions are incredibly harsh and desolate. Much of the area is restricted owing in part to the millions of landmines from World War II. And there is always the likelihood that any finds that are stumbled across will soon be covered up by the shifting desert sands.”

Better Than Drawing Straws + Eating Each Other
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938822,00.html
“While these 50,000 Persian warriors disappeared in the desert, Cambyses didn’t fare much better. At the time, he was marching on a kingdom in Ethiopia, but provisions ran out beneath a scorching sun and his troops were forced to pick lots having divided into groups of 10. According to Herodotus, the unfortunate 1 of each 10 was killed and eaten by the other ravenous troops. Cambyses eventually withdrew, chastened by Egypt and its desert.”

Dissent
http://rogueclassicism.com/2009/11/13/cambyses-lost-army-found-dont-eat-that-elmer/
http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/cambyses-not-so-lost-army/
“…The Persians controled Egypt for more than a century (from 525 to c.401) and there must have been dozens of occasions on which soldiers were sent to the west. All these expeditions may have found itself lost in the western desert…”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdf6YBxDxrY

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMGpBmiKEyc

Sandstorms 101
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/sandstorms-on-earth/2353
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenarios/1289311.html

No Provision Against Acts Of God (Or Future God-Particles)
http://edms.cern.ch/file/342513/LAST_RELEASED/AOC_E.pdf
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2009-11/bread-loving-bird-shuts-down-lhc
Bread Dropped By Bird Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)
“The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine. This incident won’t delay the reactivation of the facility later this month, but exposes yet another vulnerability of the what might be the most complex machine ever built. With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.”

Retrocausality
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
“More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half. According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. “It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.” Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.”

Long Odds
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/09/19/lhc-first-magnet-failure/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/10/14/spooky-signals-from-the-future-telling-us-to-cancel-the-lhc/
“In their December 2007 paper — before the LHC tried to turn on — they very explicitly say that a “natural” accident will come along and break the LHC if we try to turn it on. Well, we know how that turned out. But NN have an ingenious suggestion for saving us from future accidents at the LHC — which, as they warn, could endanger lives. They propose a card game with more than a million cards, almost all of which say “go ahead, no problem.” But one card says “don’t turn on the LHC!” In their model, the nonlocal effect of the imaginary part of the action is to ensure that the realized history of the universe is one in which the LHC never turns on; but it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t turn on. If we randomly pick one out of a million cards, and honestly promise to follow through on the instructions on the card we pick, and we happen to pick the card that says not to turn it on, and we therefore don’t — that’s a history of the universe that is completely unsuppressed by their mechanism. And if we choose a card that says “go ahead,” well then their theory is falsified. (Unless we try to go ahead and are continually foiled by a series of unfortunate accidents.) Best of all, playing the card game costs almost nothing. But for it to work, we have to be very sincere that we won’t turn on the LHC if that’s what the card says. It’s only a million-to-one chance, after all.”

THE AGE OF JELLYFISH
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/the-age-of-jellyfish/

ETHNO-MATHEMATICS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/ethno-mathematics/

NOTES ON THE BALINESE COCKFIGHT
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/06/01/anthro-classics-deep-play-notes-on-the-balinese-cockfight/

BAD MOVES IN CENTRAL PLANNING — DEATH TO SPARROWS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/spectre-classics-bad-moves-in-central-planning/

DON’T GREASE THE TRACK — HOBO SIGNS + SYMBOLS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/dont-grease-the-track-hobo-signs-symbols/

VALUE OF A STATISTICAL LIFE (U.S.)
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/value-of-a-statistical-life-us/

SHARIA COMPLIANT FINANCIAL PRODUCTS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/sharia-compliant-financial-products/

IF THEY’VE BOTHERED
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/if-theyve-bothered/

PAN-FRIED T-REX WITH APRICOT MINT CHUTNEY GLAZE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/pan-fried-t-rex-with-apricot-mint-chutney-glaze/

TAKE THAT, TIGER PENIS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/pigs-bladder-powder-regenerates-human-tissue/

PlayStation 3 Modification Tutorial
http://www.ps3cluster.umassd.edu/
http://www.xbox360forum.com/forum/chit-chat/87640-scientists-use-ps3s-create-supercomputer.html
“Computer hobbyists and researchers take note: two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles. The instructional guide allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source operating system Linux on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged. Frustrated with the cost of renting time on supercomputers, which he said can cost as much as $5,000 to run a 5,000-hour simulation, Khanna decided to set up his own computer cluster using PS3s, which had both a powerful processor developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, but also an open platform that allows different system software to run on it. On the how-to-guide Khanna says the eight-console cluster is roughly comparable in speed to a 200 node IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Khanna says his research now runs using a cluster of 16 PS3s. Khanna’s not the first researcher to use PS3s to simulate the effects of a supercomputer. The University of Stanford’s Folding at Home project allows people to help with research into how proteins self-assemble — or fold — by downloading software onto their home PS3s, creating a virtual supercomputer. Their research is currently targeting proteins relevant to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. But the guide posted by Khanna and Poulin is the first that might allow someone to set up a supercomputer in their own home.”

Previously On Spectre : Gravity Waves
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/gravity-waves/

See Also
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3325757/Why-scientists-love-games-consoles.html
“Todd Martínez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois to buy eight computers each driven by two of the specialised chips that are at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. He is using them to simulate the interactions between the electrons in atoms, as part of work to see how proteins in the body dovetail with drug molecules. He was inspired while browsing through his son’s games console’s technical specification “I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high performance supercomputers I had seen before,” he says. “That’s when I thought about getting one for myself.” The Wii, made by Nintendo, has a motion tracking remote control unit that is cheaper than a comparable device built from scratch. The device recently emerged as a tool to help surgeons to improve their technique. Meanwhile, neurologist Thomas Davis at the Vanderbilt Medical Centre in Nashville is using it to measure movement deficiencies in Parkinson’s patients to assess how well a patient can move when they take part in drug trials.”

Folding@home
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/02/foldinghome-rea/
Folding@home Reaches Million PS3-User Milestone
“Sony recently announced that more than one million PlayStation 3 owners are taking part in Folding@home, the distributed computing project run by Stanford University. The participation of PS3 owners in Folding@home allows the project “to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally.” Folding@home’s mission is to try and better understand how proteins fold, and how misfolds are related to various diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. PS3s currently comprise about 74 percent of the entire computing power of Folding@home. When the project achieved a petaflop in September, it officially became the most powerful distributed
computing network in the world.”

Salvaged PCs
http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/
http://extremelinux.esd.ornl.gov/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-do-it-yourself-superc
The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer
“Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using obsolete PCs that ORNL would have otherwise discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was built essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce ecoregion maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable clusters that rival the performance of the world’s best supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost. We knew that obsolete PCs at the U.S. Department of Energy complex at Oak Ridge were frequently replaced with newer models. The old PCs were advertised on an internal Web site and auctioned off as surplus equipment. A quick check revealed hundreds of outdated computers waiting to be discarded this way. Perhaps we could build our Beowulf cluster from machines that we could collect and recycle free of charge. We commandeered a room at ORNL that had previously housed an ancient mainframe computer. Then we began collecting surplus PCs to create the Stone SouperComputer. Our room at Oak Ridge turned into a morgue filled with the picked-over carcasses of dead PCs. Once we opened a machine, we recorded its contents on a “toe tag” to facilitate the extraction of its parts later on. We developed favorite and least favorite brands, models and cases and became adept at thwarting passwords left by previous owners. On average, we had to collect and process about five PCs to make one good node.”

Brain-To-Brain Technologies
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091006102637.htm
BCI Allows Person-to-Person Communication Through Power Of Thought
“New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought — with the help of electrodes, a computer and Internet connection. While attached to an EEG amplifier, the first person would generate and transmit a series of binary digits, imagining moving their left arm for zero and their right arm for one. The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one. The pattern of the flashing LEDs is too subtle to be picked by the second person, but it is picked up by electrodes measuring the visual cortex of the recipient. The encoded information is then extracted from the brain activity of the second user and the PC can decipher whether a zero or a one was transmitted. This shows true brain-to-brain activity.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=93p7oDkA5WA

Techlepathy
http://yuri.typepad.com/yuri_blog/2008/02/lift-conference.html
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Kevin:Warwick.html
“Probably the most famous piece of research undertaken by Professor Warwick is the set of experiments known as Project Cyborg, in which he had a chip implanted into his arm. The first stage of this research, which began on August 24, 1998, involved a simple transmitter being implanted beneath Professor Warwick’s skin, and used to control doors, lights, heaters, and other computer-controlled devices based on his proximity. The main purpose of this experiment was to test the limits of what the body would accept, and how easy it would be to receive a meaningful signal from the chip.

The second stage involved a far more complex chip which was implanted on March 14, 2002, and which interfaced directly into Professor Warwick’s nervous system. The electrode array inserted contained around 100 electrodes, of which 25 could be accessed at any one time, whereas the median nerve which it monitored carries many times that number of signals. A highly publicised extension to the experiment, in which a simpler array was implanted into Professor Warwick’s wife – with the aim of creating some form of telepathy or empathy. Empathy is awareness of the thoughts, feelings, or states of mind of others. When we see another human or animal experiencing something positive or negative, we instinctively identify with the other. One must be careful not to confuse empathy with sympath – was also moderately successful, although the implant seems to have been less successful at stimulating signals than at measuring them.”

Telepathy Chips
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/brain-computer-interfacing-prosthetic-limbs-telepathy-chips
“Consider the “telepathy chip” — a neural implant that allows the wearer to project their thoughts or feelings to others, and receive thoughts or feelings from others. There seems no in-principle reason why this can’t be done, but it raises a huge number of questions philosophically, technically, psychologically and socially. It’s not clear what percentage of a person’s thoughts and feelings would actually be comprehensible to another person — in many cases, you might send your thoughts to someone else only to find them interpreted as 90% gobbledygook mixed up with concepts and images that are recognizable to the receiver. It’s also not too hard to envision some of the social and economic pressures that might arise surrounding telepathy chips. Would you become suspicious if your husband or wife didn’t want to do a telepathy-chip mind-meld after coming home late Friday night? Teams of individuals linked via telepathy chips might achieve far greater efficiency at some sorts of work than any group of detached individuals with similar skill could. Computer programming comes to mind, where the hardest part of the job is often understanding what other people were thinking when they wrote the code that you have to deal with. Social subgroups rejecting telepathy chips could become isolated, backwards communities similar to the Amish today (who, it must be noted, don’t mind their backwardness and isolation at all). Ultimately, telepathy chips and related BCI devices could lead to the emergence of new forms of intelligence, “mindplexes” composed of independent human minds, yet also possessing a coherent self and consciousness at the higher level of the telepathically-interlinked human group. Humans who reject telepathic interplay with AIs could be at a significant disadvantage both socially and economically. Nearly any job requiring insight and creativity would benefit from a stream of “push technology” input from a savvy AI. Potentially all this could lead to the emergence of a global brain spanning human and artificial intelligence.”

Previously On Spectre – Telekinesis Comes To Market
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/telekinesis-comes-to-market/

Researchers Create Portable Black Hole
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2159v1
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091015/full/news.2009.1007.html
Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light
“Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat. The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic ‘resonators’ arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole’s ‘core’ until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. “The light into the core is totally absorbed,” Cui says.”

Metamaterials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/10-metamaterial-revolution-new-science-making-anything-disappear/

Artificial Event Horizons
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/fibre.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2027413242598238803#
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3325303/Device-mimics-black-hole-event-horizon.html
Device mimics black hole event horizon
“Now it seems these horizons can be mimicked using a table-top device that harnesses lasers to create an artificial black hole, according to a study by Prof Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews that could help win a Nobel prize for the world’s best known physicist, Prof Stephen Hawking. At St Andrews, Prof Leonhardt works on what are called quantum catastrophes, where so-called “singularities” can be created where the laws of wave physics are in danger of breaking down. Black holes are also singularities, where the pull of gravity is so intense that even light is sucked in. The professor’s team accomplished the feat of simulating key features of a black hole by firing lasers down an optical fibre, exploiting how different wavelengths of light move at different speeds within the fibre. Prof Hawking’s chance of winning the Nobel prize has improved markedly because this device makes it possible to test his theories, which make specific predictions about the event horizon – the rim of a black hole. “We show by theoretical calculations that such a system is capable of probing the quantum effects of horizons, in particular Hawking radiation.”

Blackest Body Yet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/ultrablack/
Scientists Make Blackest Material Ever
“Scientists have fashioned what may be the blackest material in the universe: a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures nearly every last photon of every wavelength of light. The substance absorbs between 97 percent and 99 percent of wavelengths that can be directly measured or extrapolated. It’s the closest that scientists have yet come to a black body, a theorized state of perfect absorption whose closest analogue is believed to be the opening of a deep hole. The material is made from a flat array of vertically-aligned, single-walled carbon nanotubes. Photons that aren’t immediately absorbed by a single nanotube deflect off and are absorbed by its neighbors. “This interaction,” write the researchers, “repeats until the attenuated light is completely absorbed by the forest.” To the naked eye, the substance appears perfectly flat; in effect, it’s a sheet of deep holes. By comparison, the blackest paints and coatings absorb between 84 and 95 percent of all light. Researchers say the material would be useful in solar panels or to collect heat in the frigid vacuum of space.”

Information Loss
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8836-black-holes-the-ultimate-quantum-computers.html

Previously On Spectre : Space-Time Foam
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/space-time-foam/
What Miniature Black Holes Don’t Kill You Make You Stronger
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/what-miniature-black-holes-dont-kill-you-make-you-stronger/

The Ghost Fleet Of Johor
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession-anchored-just-east-Singapore.html
Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore

“The tropical waters that lap the jungle shores of southern Malaysia could not be described as a paradisical shimmering turquoise. They are more of a dark, soupy green. They also carry a suspicious smell. But there is something slightly odder which I can’t immediately put my finger on. Then I have it – the 750ft-long merchant vessel is standing absurdly high in the water. The low waves don’t even bother the lowest mark on its Plimsoll line. It’s the same with all the ships parked here, and there are a lot of them. Close to 500. An armada of freighters with no cargo, no crew, and without a destination between them. Nearby, as we meander in searing midday heat and dripping humidity between the hulls of the silent armada, a young European officer peers at us from the bridge of an oil tanker owned by the world’s biggest container shipping line, Maersk. We circle and ask to go on board, but are waved away by two Indian crewmen who appear to be the only other people on the ship. ‘They are telling us to go away,’ the boat driver explains. ‘No one is supposed to be here. They are very frightened of pirates.’

Local fisherman Ah Wat, 42, who for more than 20 years has made a living fishing for prawns from his home in Sungai Rengit, says: ‘Before, there was nothing out there – just sea. Then the big ships just suddenly came one day, and every day there are more of them. Some of them stay for a few weeks and then go away. But most of them just stay. You used to look from here straight over to Indonesia and see nothing but a few passing boats. Now you can no longer see the horizon.’ The size of the idle fleet becomes more palpable when the ships’ lights are switched on after sunset. From the small fishing villages that dot the coastline, a seemingly endless blaze of light stretches from one end of the horizon to another. Standing in the darkness among the palm trees and bamboo huts, as calls to prayer ring out from mosques further inland, is a surreal and strangely disorientating experience. It makes you feel as if you are adrift on a dark sea, staring at a city of light.

As daylight creeps across the waters, flags of convenience from destinations such as Panama and the Bahamas become visible. In reality, though, these vessels belong to some of the world’s biggest Western shipping companies. And the sickness that has ravaged them began far away – in London, where the industry’s heart beats, and where the plummeting profits and hugely reduced cargo prices are most keenly felt. You may wish to know this because, if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500).

Three thousand miles north-east of the ghost fleet of Johor, the shipbuilding capital of the world rocks to an unpunctuated chorus of hammer-guns blasting rivets the size of dustbin lids into shining steel panels that are then lowered onto the decks of massive new vessels. As the shipping industry teeters on the brink of collapse, the activity at boatyards like Mokpo and Ulsan in South Korea all looks like a sick joke. But shipbuilding is a horrendously hard market to plan. There is a three-year lag between the placing of an order and the delivery of a ship. The labours of today’s Korean shipbuilders merely represent the completion of contracts ordered in the fat years of 2006 and 2007. Those ships will now sail out into a global economy that no longer wants them. ‘Whole communities in places like Mokpo and Ulsan are involved in shipbuilding,’ Wallis says. ‘So far the shipyards are continuing to work, but there have hardly been any new orders in the past year. In 2011, the shipyards will simply run out of ships to build.’”

Abandoned Sailors Go On Hunger Strike
http://maritimenews.info/shipping-news/stranded-russian-sailors-go-on-a-hunger-strike-in-dubai/

“Three Russian seamen from a vessel stranded in the port of Dubai began a hunger strike on Friday, an International Transport Workers’ Federation official said. The Magdalena, owned by a German company and flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda, has been anchored in Dubai since early August. The vessel’s owner reportedly owes the crew $230,000 in wage arrears. Onboard are nine Russians, two Ukrainians, four citizens of the Philippines, and one Estonian. “The captain of the vessel said that three crew members… went on hunger strike. The vessel’s owner has also been informed,” Pyotr Osichansky said. The seamen demand repatriation and the repayment of wage arrears, and refuse to perform their duties. In early September the crew asked for international aid as they were running out of food and water. A week later two weeks’ worth of water supplies, provisions for three weeks, and fuel for 50 days were provided. A total of 23 Russian sailors are currently in a similar situation on two other vessels – the Piryit bulk carrier, which is stranded near the port of Cristobal in Panama, and the Southern Pearl vessel is anchored off the Bulgarian coast.”

Repo Man, International Waters
http://www.vesselextractions.com/
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/01/local/me-repoman1
This repo man drives off with ocean freighters

“If repossessing a used Chevrolet can be tricky, consider retrieving the Aztec Express, a 700-foot cargo ship under guard in Haiti as civil unrest spread through the country. Only a few repo men possess the guile and resourcefulness for such a job. One of them is F. Max Hardberger, of Lacombe, La. Since 1991, the 58-year-old attorney and ship captain has surreptitiously sailed away about a dozen freighters from ports around the world. “I’m sure there are those who would like to add me to a list of modern pirates of the Caribbean, but I do whatever I can to protect the legal rights of my clients,” said Hardberger, whose company, Vessel Extractions in New Orleans, has negotiated the releases of another dozen cargo ships and prevented the seizures of many others. His line of work regularly takes him to a corner of the maritime industry still plagued by pirates, underhanded business practices and corrupt government officials. “International waters,” Hardberger said, “are worse than the Wild West. In many ways, there is little or no opportunity to avenge the wrongs people have done to you.” Before repossessing a ship, they make sure the vessel has been seized illegally and the claims filed against it are fraudulent. If negotiations and legal methods fail, the company will proceed with an extraction, a step that might include payments to local officials if a nation’s government is corrupt. Those payments, Hardberger said, are made under exceptions in the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from bribing foreign officials to retain or obtain business. “In a rogue state, you can’t tie your hands behind you,” Hardberger said. “It is common to find that the court system is rife with corruption.”"

Alang: Where Ships Go To Die
http://www.wesjones.com/shipbreakers.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/bigbreak/resources.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/alang-the-place-where-ships-go-to-die-1779656.html
Thanks to recession, Gujarat’s ship-breaking yards are booming, but impact on environment is toxic

“It is known as the graveyard of ships, a place where ageing vessels are torn apart by unskilled labourers and the metal then sold on as scrap. The scrapping of ships in South Asia – Bangladesh and Pakistan are also major scrappers – is a rudimentary, almost medieval affair. Ships are allowed to beach on the sands and then armies of men with little or no training pull apart the ships with hand-tools. Toxic substances such as mercury and asbestos are allowed to seep into the environment. One of the attractions to the ship owners of having their vessels dismantled here is that the ship breakers in this part of the world receive little of the regulatory oversight that takes place in Europe or the US. Over the last 10 months, the scrappers at Alang in Gujarat have received and dismantled around 280 ships, up from 163 during the same period a year earlier. Some breakers believe that over a 12-month period from January, they might reach a total of 400 ships. On the edge of Alang a huge flea market has sprung up, selling multifarious equipment and fittings taken from the ships. Locals say that when an owner decides to scrap a vessel, they rarely have the time or opportunity to make a full assessment of the value of such things. As a result, the flea market sells everything from ships motors and cutlery sets to fridges and lifeboats at bargain prices. “Last year I bought a torque wrench here for about 3,500 rupees (£44), which would have cost me 50,000 on the open market,” Vasant Pachal, an engineering workshop owner from the city of Vadodara, recently told The Hindustan Times while browsing at the market. “Apart from the great deals, I get to see the latest in technology every time I come here.”"

Previously On Spectre — Dubai Skips
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/dubai-skips/
So Is It Mom Or Chevrolet?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/mom-or-chevrolet/
Today’s Pirate
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/11/23/todays-pirate/
Cashless Capitalism
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/cashless-capitalism/
Worldwide Food Riots
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/worldwide-food-riots/
Taken To The Streets
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/taken-to-the-streets/
Fairly Bad Indicators
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/fairly-bad-indicators/
April Fools! Dollar Actually Fine
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/april-fools-dollar-actually-fine/

Realtime Sat Tracking
http://science.nasa.gov/RealTime/jtrack/3d/
http://satellite.tracks.free.fr/satrace/satrace.php?language=en

Community Networks
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1046475/community-wi-fi-network-satellite-dishes
Community Wi-Fi network even uses satellite dishes
“Among the most popular attractions of this year’s CAFECONF 07 Linux conference down in Argentina, the “Buenos Aires Libre” group, is promoting its hobbyist, city-wide “community network”. B.A. Libre aims to run a network with its own backbone, capable of routing traffic between nodes even if the Internet goes down, it doesn’t rely on the public internet for transportation. The project was kick-started by a handful users a long six years ago and after several iterations and change of structure and leadership, now seems to show steady progress. The BAL network spine uses point-to-point links and directional antennas along with inexpensive consumer Wi-Fi APs or in some instances full PCs in waterproof enclosures- loaded with their own customized Linux software, dubbed Obelisco – Spanish for ‘obelisk’ the city’s landmark. I asked them if they had any run-ins with the airwaves watchdog and their response was an emphatic no. There’s a regulation making selling VOIP or telephony services using Wi-Fi equipment strictly and specifically forbidden by the airwaves watchdog, but it’s aimed at ISPs. First BAL is a non-profit endeavour, a community network, and it doesn’t aim to provide any specific services, just inter-connect computers. Thus the local regulating authority gives them no hassle at all because such non-profit usage falls within the ‘private use’ considerations of the local regulations. On the software/organisation aspect, they have done a quite impressive job. The Wiki shows a lot of work, and there’s even an on-line map built using Google Maps satellite images and showcasing all nodes and clients, and which are currently active. The registration /membership system is also well done. Dubbed the “BA Libre Location System” or BALLS for short, the project’s web map lists 259 “points of interest”, that is, either nodes or users who have decided to take part in this project in the whole capital city and its metro area of influence, with 13 on-line nodes and APs in BA city at the time of this writing. There is also a Wiki, an IRC channel and mailing lists.”
http://balls.buenosaireslibre.org/
http://wiki.buenosaireslibre.org/Obelisco
http://www.buenosaireslibre.org/

TV On The Radio
http://www.pervisell.co.uk/ham/gs1.htm
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/sstv.html
“Slow scan television is a way of sending video over a voice bandwidth channel–this can make it practical to send video over thousands of miles via ionospheric propagation. Modern computers have this once rare and expensive mode readily available to the average ham.”

SSTV
http://www.kent.net/ve3rdn/software.html
http://www.kent.net/ve3rdn/ve3rdn.html
“The best way to understand slow scan TV is to imagine it as colour fax pictures but sent over the radio rather than the phone. The pictures are transmitted via tones (1200-2300 HRZ) over the air. There are several simple ways to get setup for slow scan TV, the simplest of which use your computer and software with a hardware interface. There are interface circuits which work excellent and cost less than $20 to build or nil if from your junk box. The quality of the pictures is somewhat dependent upon the computer, (monitor & graphics card), and somewhat on the software, hardware. The better systems support Hicolour which gives typical picture resolutions of 320 x 240 in 32 thousand colours. These pictures are almost photographic quality and are very impressive to say the least. Once you’ve tried it your hooked. Imagine being able to swap mug shots with other Amateurs. See who you’re talking to. Send diagrams and schematics over the air. It’s great. Listen to HF on 14.230 and 14.233 almost anytime to hear the action.”

Guerrilla Television
http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Television
Experience Behind the Iron Curtan
“Before the downfall of the Soviet Union, there were a number of pirate TV operations scattered around Eastern Europe. Many were guerrilla style hit-and-run operations that would rig up a low-tech transmitter with a junked VCR, set to go on the air during the official government newscast, overriding the signal for several blocks. When the authorities found the transmitter, often on the roof of an apartment house or in an vacant building, they would find home-built equipment that had been abandoned, rigged to a timer switch. Much of the programming was very short (since the authorities would be searching for the source within minutes) and usually consisted of recordings from foreign broadcasters like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, with still photos for visuals. One brave pirate in Moscow would show a tape of the official government news broadcast, with someone else’s voice dubbed onto the soundtrack, reading uncensored news peppered with dirty jokes. In 1985, some very brave astronomers from Poland’s University of Torun used home-made equipment to superimpose pro-Solidarity slogans over the images of the state-run TV network. [1] You can imagine how the viewing public (as well as the authorities) must have felt when, during the official government news broadcast, the words “SOLIDARITY TORUN: ENOUGH OF PRICE HIKES, LIES AND REPRESSION” flashed on the screen. In 1977, back when the UK used analogue television, someone identified as “Vrillion” of the “Ashtar Galactic Command” over-rode the audio channel of England’s Southern Television for 6 minutes.”

Signal Hacks Of Live Satellites
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/13/068222
http://www.dailynews.lk/2007/04/13/news01.asp
Intelsat to turn off LTTE beam – Tigers’ satellite piracy bared
“The Washington-based Intelsat gave a firm assurance yesterday that it would take all possible steps to stop the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from illegally broadcasting its propaganda over their satellites. In a telephone interview, Intelsat’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel Phillip Spector told this correspondent that his corporation would do “every possible thing to turn off the LTTE (sponsored national Television of Tamil Eelam and Voice of the Tigers radio programme) as soon as possible” from their satellite. Spector maintained the position of the corporation that the LTTE was pirating an empty transponder frequency of their Satellite 12 for the broadcasts. He said it was actually stealing the space of the satellite and called it piracy.”

Known Sat Hacks (cont.)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FGI/is_8_13/ai_91204584/
Behind Falun Gong’s satellite hack – cult hijacks satellite signal
“The Chinese government is furious over a rare but successful case of satellite signal hijacking in which TV signals from the Sinosat-1 satellite were temporarily overridden and replaced with programming promoting the outlawed Falun Gong cult. According to an official Sinosat statement released 8 July, a series of signal hijacks occurred between 23 June and 30 June 2002, attacking Sinosat’s 2A and 3A transponders, which provide TV signals to rural villages in China via an earth station in Yungang, which reported that all of state TV broadcaster CCTV’s nine channels, as well as 10 provincial channels, had been hijacked by “unidentified signals … of similar frequency spectrum with that of the CCTV programs”. Minutes after monitor screens went black, Sinosat says, “Falun Gong propaganda materials appeared on screen; and … the word `Falun Gong’ in Chinese flashed again on the screen”. The Chinese government–which outlawed the Falun Gong as an “evil cult” in 1999, and also puts a premium on strict media control–has predictably condemned the hijackings, and has vowed to hunt down and punish those responsible. One obstacle Chinese officials face in that regard is whether the hijackers are even within China’s legal jurisdiction. The Ministry of information Industry has accused–but not publicly identified–overseas parties of helping to plan the interruption.

Hijacking Sinosat signals from outside the country is possible since Sinosat’s footprint extends well outside China’s borders, to include the Indo-Chinese peninsula, Indonesia and the Philippines. Satellite experts say that overriding a satellite signal requires a satellite dish transceiver a minimum of three meters wide and with a transmission power well beyond the capabilities of off-the-shelf consumer gear. Hijackers would either have to commandeer an earth station facility or get hold of an industrial-grade dish that can be moved around and hidden. This is why jamming satellite signals is often the province of military organizations and disgruntled earth station employees rather than independent groups. However, it wouldn’t be the first time Falun Gong members have interrupted regular TV programming in China. In April, Chinese officials arrested nine Falun Gong members for hacking into a Chinese cable TV system on 5 March in the northeastern city of Changchun, where they allegedly cut off TV signals and used home-made broadcasting equipment to air their own programs. And that was one of seven reported cable-TV hacks during the first half of this year, according to the group’s Falun Dafa Information Center, which confirmed the activity in a 28 June editorial–five days after the first satellite signal hijacking was reported.”

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE — EARTH WILL HAVE RINGS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/earth-will-have-rings/
CONSUMER SATELLITE USE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/consumer-satellite-use/
BRAZILIAN SATELLITE SQUATTERS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/brazilian-satellite-squatters/
COWS AS COMPASS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/cows-as-compass/
SATELLITE KILLER
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/satellite-killer/
SOLAR FLARES AND OTHER PROTECTIONS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/solar-flares-and-other-protections/
RUSSIANS LAUNCHING SATELLITES FROM SUBS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/russians-launching-satellites-from-subs/

Bonus : Pringles Cantenna
http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/antennas/mypringles.html
http://www.netscum.com/~clapp/wireless.html
“I’d like to say a little bit about Electromagnetic Waves. Before you do anything else, it is important to think carefully about all the possible consequences of what you are doing. Simply put, you are going to be sending electromagnetic waves through the air. If you do not know what you are doing, study until you are confident that you will not break people, places or things when you start experimenting. As if this was not yet enough to keep you from messing around with fast flying electrons, I have received many emails from folks who are very involved with HAM radio and other professions and hobbies that involve work with high frequency microwave radiation. They warn that 2.4 GHz just happens to also be the resonant frequency of plain old water. This is why a microwave oven works. The energy of an 802.11b device is the same kind of energy that cooks your food, but on a much smaller scale. This is important considering that we as humans are 98% made of water. I have been warned that exposure to even as little as a 1/4 watt amplified with a 14db antenna, such as described here, could lead to severe vision problems and possibly other health issues.”

And The Bugs Inside Them
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/termites
“The greatest mystery of all is found in the worker termite’s third gut, which is delineated by an intricately structured stomach valve, as unique from species to species as individual snowflakes are and, in its way, just as lovely. The size of a sesame seed, the third gut contains a dense mush of symbiotic microbes. Many of these microbes live nowhere else on Earth; they depend on adult termites to pass them on to the young by means of a “woodshake,” a microbial slurry. Recently, sophisticated genetic sequencing produced an inventory of more than 80,000 genes, spanning some 300 microbial species, from the guts of Costa Rican termites. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines. Last year the Department of Energy founded three Bioenergy Research Centers, which collectively house scientists from seven government labs, 18 universities, and several private companies, and are aimed at making cellulosic ethanol competitive with gasoline within five years. The centers are expected to come up with ideas that can be commercialized—actually making them more like Bell Labs, say, than like the Manhattan Project. Even for people accustomed to avalanches of data, the effort to map the contents of the termite’s third gut is extraordinary. “A disgusting mess of a data set,” says Phil Hugenholtz, the head of the institute’s Microbial Ecology Program. Traditional genomic analysis sequences one organism at a time, but Hugenholtz is a leading practitioner of metagenomics—the new science of sequencing genes from whole environments of microbes at once, and sorting out the resulting jumble of loose DNA code with the aid of computer science, statistics, and biochemistry. Metagenomics is not only breathtakingly fast; it allows us to catalog genes that were previously unknowable because so few types of microorganisms—fewer than 1 percent of all species of bacteria—can be cultured in a lab. Many biologists regard metagenomics as a scientific revolution akin to the invention of the microscope.”

Extremophiles
http://www.verenium.com/specialty-enzymes.asp
“In the quest to discover novel products, Verenium has pioneered the field of “bioprospecting”. This has enabled the company to tap into the vast genetic resources of the microbial world by venturing into varied and often hostile environments, such as volcanoes and deep sea hydrothermal vents. Because the harsh temperatures and pH conditions in which these “extremophiles” live often mimic conditions found in today’s industrial processes, extremophilic microbes represent a valuable source of potential products.”

Coal-Eating
http://www.humaxx.com/pdf/Coal-Eating_Microbes_PR_070809.pdf
“Arctech’s microbes have been bio-engineered from the digestive systems of specially-bred termites, which are unique in their ability to digest the compressed, fossilised plant matter we know as coal.”

Metagenomics
http://dels.nas.edu/metagenomics/
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18073/
“Microorganisms make up an immensely important and often overlooked part of the environment. “They constitute the bulk of our biosphere and underpin all the nutrient cycles on our planet,” says Philip Hugenholtz, leader of the microbial ecology program at the Joint Genome Institute. Converting cellulose in trees and grasses into the simple sugars that can be fermented into ethanol is a very energy-intensive process. “If we had better enzymatic machinery to do that, we might be better able to make sugars into ethanol,” Bristow says. “Termites are the world’s best bioconverters.” Researchers at the Joint Genome Institute, which sequenced some of the human genome and is now largely devoted to metagenomics, have just finished sequencing the microbial community living in the termite gut. They have already identified a number of novel cellulases–the enzymes that break down cellulose into sugar–and are now looking at the guts of other insects that digest wood, such as an anaerobic population that eats poplar chips. The end result will be “basically a giant parts list that synthetic biologists can put together to make an ideal energy-producing organism,” says Hugenholtz. Several other projects–from whale carcasses to wastewater sludge–are under way or already complete, promising a huge volume of novel genetic data. A recent project at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, identified three new organisms living in the highly acidic environment of abandoned mines. (Bacteria covering the floors of these mines convert iron into acid, which can then pollute nearby streams.) “They are close to the size of viruses and may be the smallest organisms ever discovered,” says Brett Baker, a research scientist at UC Berkeley. These organisms may give clues to other life forms adapted to extreme environments, such as Mars…”

HELLO AND WELCOME
TO OUR EXCITING NEW SITUATION

WE ARE ONLY HERE TO HELP
THIS WILL JUST TAKE A MINUTE
IF YOU BELIEVE IN TIME, THAT IS
(HUMANS DON’T WELL UNDERSTAND IT)

MEANWHILE SOME OF YOU LOOK CONFUSED

HERE’S WHAT WE ARE :
A SAMPLING

RECENTLY ON SPECTRE
————————————
TOO FAR TO SHOUT
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/too-far-to-shout/
BRAZILIAN SATELLITE SQUATTERS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/brazilian-satellite-squatters/
ARE WE ON THE CLOCK?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/are-we-on-the-clock/
MYTH OF FINGERPRINTS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/myth-of-fingerprints/
RETHINKING THE LIPSTICK INDEX
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/great-sex-strikes-thru-history/
COCAINE AS METAPHOR
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/cocaine-as-metaphor/
TANGANYIKA LAUGHTER EPIDEMIC, 1962-64
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/tanganyika-laughter-epidemic-1962-64/
VICTORY IN SIGHT
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/victory-in-sight/
IDLE THEORY
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/idle-theory/
TODAY’S PIRATE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/todays-pirate/
MONKEY MONEY
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/monkey-money/

A WARNING SHOT
WE LOVE YOU ALREADY
HELLO

GARBAGE PATCH IS SIZE OF CONTINENT
http://www.digitaluniverse.net/upcycling/articles/view/135971/
The World’s Largest “Landfill” is the Middle of the Ocean

There is a large part of the central Pacific Ocean that no one ever visits and only a few ever pass through. Sailors avoid it like the plague for it lacks the wind they need to sail. Fisherman leave it alone because its lack of nutrients makes it an oceanic desert. This area includes the “horse latitudes,” where stock transporters in the age of sail got stuck, ran out of food and water and had to jettison their horses and other livestock. Surprisingly, this is the largest ocean realm on our planet, being about the size of Africa – over ten million square miles. A huge mountain of air, which has been heated at the equator, and then begins descending in a gentle clockwise rotation as it approaches the North Pole, creates this ocean realm. The circular winds produce circular ocean currents which spiral into a center where there is a slight down-welling. Scientists know this atmospheric phenomenon as the subtropical high, and the ocean current it creates as the north Pacific central or sub-tropical gyre. Because of the stability of this gentle maelstrom, the largest uniform climatic feature on earth is also an accumulator of the debris of civilization.

If plastic doesn’t biodegrade, what does it do? It “photo-degrades” – a process in which it is broken down by sunlight into smaller and smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers, eventually becoming individual molecules of plastic, still too tough for anything to digest. For the last fifty-odd years, every piece of plastic that has made it from our shores to the Pacific Ocean, has been breaking down and accumulating in the central Pacific gyre. Oceanographers like Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the world’s leading flotsam expert, refer to it as the great Pacific Garbage Patch. The problem is that it is not a patch, it’s the size of a continent, and it’s filling up with floating plastic waste. On our return trip to Santa Barbara, we discovered something never before documented -a Langmuir Windrow of plastic debris. Circular ocean currents with contrary rotation create long lines of material, visible from above as streaks on the ocean. Normally these are formed by planktonic organisms or foam, but we discovered one made of plastic. Everything from huge hawsers to tiny fragments were formed into a miles long line. We picked up hundreds of pounds of netting of all types bailed together in this system along with every type and size of debris imaginable. Sometimes, windrows like this drift down over the Hawaiian Islands. That is when Waimanalo Beach on Oahu gets coated with blue green plastic sand, along with staggering amounts of larger debris. Farther to the northwest, at the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve, monk seals, the most endangered mammal species in the United States, get entangled in debris, especially cheap plastic nets lost or discarded by the fishing industry. Ninety percent of Hawaiian green sea turtles nest here and eat the debris, mistaking it for their natural food, as do Laysan and Black Footed Albatross. Indeed, the stomach contents of Laysan Albatross look like the cigarette lighter shelf at a convenience store they contain so many of them.

It’s not just entanglement and indigestion that are problems caused by plastic debris, however. There is a darker side to pollution of the ocean by ubiquitous plastic fragments.
As these fragments float around, they accumulate the poisons we manufacture for various purposes that are not water-soluble. It turns out that plastic polymers are sponges for DDT, PCBs and nonylphenols -oily toxics that don’t dissolve in seawater. Plastic pellets have been found to accumulate up to one million times the level of these poisons
that are floating in the water itself. These are not like heavy metal poisons which affect the animal that ingests them directly. Rather, they are what might be called “second
generation “ toxics. Animals have evolved receptors for elaborate organic molecules called hormones, which regulate brain activity and reproduction. Hormone receptors
cannot distinguish these toxics from the natural estrogenic hormone, estradiol, and when the pollutants dock at these receptors instead of the natural hormone, they have been shown to have a number of negative effects in everything from birds and fish to humans. The whole issue of hormone disruption is becoming one of, if not the biggest
environmental issue of the 21st Century. Hormone disruption has been implicated in lower sperm counts and higher ratios of females to males in both humans and animals. 
Unchecked, this trend is a dead end for any species. A trillion trillion vectors for our worst pollutants are being ingested by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented, the mucus web feeding jellies and salps (chordate jellies that are the fastest growing multicellular organisms on the planet) out in the middle of the ocean. These organisms are in turn eaten by fish and then, certainly in many cases, by humans. We can grow pesticide free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pesticide free organic fish?”

CANADIAN TEEN DECOMPOSES PLASTIC BAG IN 3 MONTHS
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/teen-decomposes.html

The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria. (At between one-half and 90 percent of Earth’s biomass, bacteria’s a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery.) The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas. Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide. Amazing stuff. I’ll try to get an interview with this young man who may have managed to solve one of the most intractable environmental dilemmas of our time. And I can’t help but wonder whether his high school already had its prom. If he doesn’t get to be king, there’s no justice in this world.

YEAST, TAP WATER, DIRT
http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags


Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true. After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high numbers in nature. First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees. After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture. Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less. That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.

Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce. Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know — and they’ve looked — Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first. Next, Burd tested his strains’ effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow. At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks. The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn’t tried that yet. To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too. Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. “All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags.” The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide — each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd. “This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.”

UPCYCLING
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14764
Plastic-munching bugs turn waste bottles into cash

Newly discovered bacterial alchemists could help save billions of plastic bottles from landfill. The Pseudomonas strains can convert the low-grade PET plastic used in drinks bottles into a more valuable and biodegradable plastic called PHA. PHA is already used in medical applications, from artery-supporting tubes called stents to wound dressings. The plastic can be processed to have a range of physical properties. However, one of the barriers to PHA reaching wider use is the absence of a way to make it in large quantities. The new bacteria-driven process – termed upcycling – could address that, and make recycling PET bottles more economically attractive.

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE – BIODEGRADABLE PLASTICS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/spectre-investor-biodegradable-plastics/
DOMESTICATING BIOTECH
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/domesticating-biotech/
GROW YER OWN BACTERIAL SLAVE ARMY
SEA MONKEYS DONE FOR GOOD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/09/05/grow-your-own-bacterial-slave-army-sea-monkeys-done-for-good/

[SHARING IS CARING - Allow us a brief introduction: before we had a name, the Spectre Event Horizon Group used to meet weekly at a bar to commiserate and trade what our business friends call best practices. The group has expanded tremendously since then, but remains premised on smartening the crowd mind. There are no subject limits; a favorite is our sci-fi present, though we like anything that goes toward a better understanding of human behavior + ecology. Our basic idea: to connect minds with mind-blowing information, + create a space for the informal trade of very specialized investigative research, presented for the non-specialist as fair use. The Spectre email list is a moderated open forum. People are encouraged to join and to post. Contact us at spectre.event.horizon.group [at] gmail.com, or to join go to www.spectregroup.org.]