I’d love to try this one

United Breaks Guitars

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

I wonder how many alien civilizations got to a point like we have where we are very close to creating life, understanding the universe and all those other remarkable advances and knowledge we have made, only to, like us, be faced with extinction as a result of the efforts that got us here. Make no bones about it, because we have left solving this problem in the hands of politicians, nothing will be done until it is far too late to stop a runaway greenhouse effect.

Attractive males release fewer sperm per mating to maximise their chances of producing offspring across a range of females, according to a new paper on the evolution of ejaculation strategies. The findings by researchers at UCL (University College London) and the University of Oxford suggest that, paradoxically, matings with attractive males may be less fertile than those with unattractive ones.

And hey that goes a long way toward explaining why they are such unfaithful bastards too doesn’t it

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was named by the Pentagon as one of 74 former captives who returned to terrorism after being released has done no such thing.

Instead, he has returned to doing what he was really doing before being picked up by US forces and shuttled off to Gitmo for six years: Working as a politician, a tribal elder representing Afghanistan’s Kunar province

So says a new report from McClatchy Newspapers, which profiles Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil, a tribal elder who regularly meets with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other government officials on behalf of the people of Kunar province.

Wondering minds want to know, Did he later desecrate the cracker by throwing it in the garbage or flushing it down the toilet?

A team of British scientists announced that they have created human sperm from embryonic stem cells. The achievement is a first in medicine and underscores the need for broad-based stem cell research.

Some women have longed to live in a world without men, but they have always conceded that their need for men was a reflection of their need to reproduce the species. Now, a team of British scientists may have created an environment where human sperm could be readily produced using abundant embryonic stem cells.

While this may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, the claim is real and was announced by researchers working out of Newcastle University.

via Michael Krebbs

We’re done for, a new age of parthogenesis is dawning, and men we are, figuratively speaking of course, screwed.

ScienceDaily (July 7, 2009) — Comprehensive regulation of gun sellers appears to reduce the trafficking of guns to criminals, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Preventing the diversion of guns to criminals is important because 85 percent of guns recovered by police were recovered from criminal suspects who were not the original purchasers of the guns according to prior research from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

The Hopkins study is the first to gather and incorporate measures of the enforcement of gun sale laws into a study of the effectiveness of those laws. It is available online in the Journal of Urban Health and in the just-released July 2009 print edition.

“In the U.S., few states have a comprehensive system to keep firearms sellers accountable,” said the study’s lead author Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, and co-director of the Bloomberg School’s Center for Gun Policy and Research and associate professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management. “Our analysis found that the states with strong regulations and oversight of gun dealers, as well as regulation of private sellers, have far less gun trafficking than do states that lack these measures.”

Of course the wingnut eliminationists will just claim that the study were rigged for Obama so he can take their guns away, then march them all into the secret concentration camps (guarded by black helicopters of course) that Clinton stated to build the last time there was a DINO president.

• 1,000 = 10³ or 2¹⁰ = 1 Kilobyte (KB)
• 1,000,000 = 10⁶ = or 2²⁰ = 1Megabyte (MB)
• 1,000,000,000 = 10⁹ or 2³⁰ = 1Gigabyte (GB)
• 1,000,000,000,000 = 10¹² or 2⁴⁰ = 1 Terabyte (TB)
• 1,000,000,000,000,000 = 10¹⁵ or 2⁵⁰ = 1 Petabyte (1PB)
• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10¹⁸ or 2⁶⁰ = 1 Exabyte (EB)
• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10²¹ or 2⁷⁰ = 1 Zetabyte (ZB)
• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10²⁴ or 2⁸⁰ = 1 Yottabyte (YB)
• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10²⁷ or 2⁹⁰ = 1 Nobibyte (NB)
• 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10³⁰ or 2¹⁰⁰ = 1 Dogbibyte (DB)

No one talks about Kilobytes anymore and hardly even Megabytes. We still occasionally talk about Kilobits (Kb) when discussing connection rates as bits is measure of data transfer whereas bytes are a measure of data size. For most of us it’s all about GB and TB – you can a decent 1 TB hard drive now for a few hundred dollars. When I got my first computer in 1992 it had a 28MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM. Now I have 1×80GB (internal), and 2×100GB (external) drives along with 2GB RAM on my laptop. In 1992 the very concept of a PB or EB of data was never considered by most home users and I suspect damned few professionals as well (except say the CIA and NSA). Not any more.

(Secrecy News)The increasing capability of high-resolution military and intelligence sensors is producing ever growing quantities of data that could overwhelm the capacity to analyze them without new approaches to data management and analysis, according to a newly released report (pdf) from the JASON defense advisory panel. “As the amount of data captured by these sensors grows, the difficulty in storing, analyzing, and fusing the sensor data becomes increasingly significant,” the report said. Extrapolating from current trends, data production could hypothetically reach the Yottabyte range by 2015.

I wonder how long it will be before we have to come up with a name for 10³³ or 2¹¹⁰ Bytes and not be surprised at having to do so.

via youtube

The Omo River is an important river of southern Ethiopia. Its course is entirely contained within the boundaries of Ethiopia, and empties into Lake Turkana on the border with Kenya. It is the principal stream of an endorheic drainage basin; the part that the Omo drains includes part of the western Oromia Region and the middle of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region. There in the confines of Ethiopia, centuries away from modernity, Hans Sylvester photographed during six years the tribes where men, women, children, old people, are geniuses of an ancient art, body painting.

The region provides a vast range of pigments, red ochre, white kaolin, copper green, yellow or light gray ash. The Omo Tribes are genius of body painting, and their bodies of two meters high is a huge canvas. The strength of their art lies in three words: fingers, speed and freedom. They draw open hands, the tip of nails, sometimes with a piece of wood, a reed, a crushed stem. The lively gestures, rapid, spontaneous, beyond childhood, this essential movement that major contemporary masters seek when they learned a lot and try to forget everything.

Body Painting, only the desire to decorate, to seduce, to be beautiful, a game and a permanent pleasure. The Omo Tribe in Africa just have to plunge their fingers into the clay and, in two minutes, on the chest, breasts, pubic area, legs, is born nothing less than a Miro, Picasso, Pollock, a Tàpies, a Klee