Corrosive Canvas

When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 16:29:00 +0000

A rapid-fire series of announcements in June foreshadow an increase in antitrust scrutiny of the tech companies that shape our economy. Nancy Pelosi summed it up on Twitter: “The era of self-regulation is over.” The House Judiciary Committee has opened an investigation into competition in digital markets, while the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have divided authority between themselves over Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. The DOJ will oversee any antitrust investigation of Google and Apple, leaving Facebook and Amazon to the FTC. Google and Facebook are presumed to be the focus.
The momentum to do something has been building, and for good reason. Consumers get to search the internet and connect with friends for free. But the cost is surveillance—across the whole web. This surveillance has concentrated the powers of influence and persuasion in the hands of two companies, with the sanctity of our democracy as the price. Congress recently investigated Russia's use of Facebook advertising to influence our 2016 presidential election, and is currently investigating whether Google is partly to blame for the wholesale decline of news publishers in America.
Even this is not the whole story. With the companies' revenues a function of sucking up more and more of users' time, their game becomes one of addiction. This may be why, at the World Economic Forum at Davos last year, George Soros branded them as a “menace” to society, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called on countries to regulate them like they do the tobacco companies. {Read on}

The Power of Nightmares - BBC - Adam Curtis

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:41:00 +0000

The Power of Nightmares 1: The Rise of the... by GalaVentura

Part 1 "The Rise of the Politics of Fear"
The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the U.S. to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation under Gamal Abdel Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite "vanguard" to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser's jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he inspires the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted by their western-inspired leaders and thus may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him.
At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the general failure of President Johnson's "Great Society". They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of "Team B", they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods. President Reagan is convinced nonetheless.

The Power of Nightmares 2: The Phantom Victory... by GalaVentura

Part 2 “The Phantom Victory"
In the second episode, Islamist factions, rapidly falling under the more radical influence of Zawahiri and his rich Saudi acolyte Osama bin Laden, join the Neo-Conservative-influenced Reagan Administration to combat the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. They are successful in repulsing the Soviet armies and, when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups believe they are the primary architects of the "Evil Empire's" defeat. Curtis argues that the Soviets were on their last legs anyway, and were doomed to collapse without intervention.
However, the Islamists see it quite differently, and in their triumph believe that they had the power to create 'pure' Islamic states in Egypt and Algeria. However, attempts to create perpetual Islamic states are blocked by force. The Islamists then try to create revolutions in Egypt and Algeria by the use of terrorism to scare the people into rising up. However, the people are terrified by the violence and the Algerian government uses their fear as a way to maintain power. In the end, the Islamists declare the entire populations of the countries as inherently contaminated by western values, and finally in Algeria turn on each other, each believing that other terrorist groups are not pure enough Muslims either.

In America, the Neo-Conservatives' aspirations to use the United States military power for further destruction of evil are thrown off track by the ascent of George HW Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to demonise Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality. To their disappointment, however, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy; to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source: the United States.

The Power Of Nightmares 03: The Shadows In The... by GalaVentura

Part 3 “The Shadows in the Cave"
The final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda. Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. The film instead argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, US prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head of a massive terrorist organisation called "al-Qaeda". With the September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy, leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism.

The Boy With Divine Powers

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 18:01:00 +0000

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (2014), a brilliant documentary about a brilliant performer.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 13:30:00 +0000

Ancient Aliens Debunked

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:43:00 +0000

The British Empire In Colour

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 06:37:00 +0000

This is how the US operates

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 17:40:00 +0000

'Person of Interest': The TV Show That Predicted Edward Snowden

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:40:00 +0000

The morning of June 9, 2013, was surreal for the writers of "Person of Interest," the science-fictional CBS drama about government surveillance. Sixteen months earlier, they had written an episode about an N.S.A. whistle-blower - a fresh-faced, thirty-three-year-old analyst named Henry Peck. When Peck discovers that his agency is conducting "illegal surveillance on a massive scale," he sets up a meeting with a journalist, and soon finds himself evading a squad of government assassins. ("Our own government has been spying on us," he says, "and they're trying to kill me to cover it up!") The episode, called "No Good Deed," had aired in May, 2012.

Now, more than a year later, it turned out that there was a real N.S.A. whistle-blower: Edward Snowden. Like the fictional Peck, Snowden had a youthful face, a swoop of brown hair, and an idealistic streak that seemed at odds with his job at a spy agency. "We all came into work having read the Guardian article," Amanda Segel, a writer and co-executive producer, recalled, "and we realized we had actually done an episode that mirrored this very real story in Season 1." The writers spent the morning adjusting to the idea that their "grounded sci-fi" show had somehow become, as Segel put it, "more real."

In the Guardian article, Snowden said that he couldn't, in good conscience, "allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom, and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." Since its première, in 2011, "Person of Interest" (which airs on Tuesdays at 10 P.M.) has taken the idea of a surveillance machine literally: in the world of the show, the government has built a vast, artificially intelligent computer system called the Machine, which reads every e-mail, listens to every phone call, and watches every CCTV camera. Flawlessly, and without human intervention, the Machine provides the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. with the identities of terrorist plotters around the world. But because it sees everything - it reads the e-mails not only of terrorists but also of regular citizens - the Machine can predict when ordinary people are planning violent crimes. The government ignores these predictions, and it falls to Harold Finch (Michael Emerson), the reclusive computer genius who invented the Machine, to respond. In partnership with a former Special Operations soldier named John Reese (Jim Caviezel), Finch leads a vigilante team of hackers, cops, and former Special Ops personnel to stop the crimes before they happen.

The show's cleverest twist is the Machine's off-kilter respect for civil liberties. Programmed never to divulge personal information about its surveillance targets, the Machine dispenses only their Social Security numbers. (The show's creators got the idea from the book "The Watchers," a history of N.S.A. surveillance by the journalist Shane Harris, which describes how John Poindexter, the head of the Total Information Awareness program, envisioned a Machine-like system equipped with a module that would hide the identities of surveillees from intelligence analysts, representing them only with numerical codes.) Thanks to the Machine's probity, it's unclear at the beginning of most episodes whether the person of the week is "the victim" or "the perpetrator"; all we know is that he or she is about to be involved in something bad. As a result, everyone must be equally surveilled. Much of the show's energy derives from this ambiguous setup. Even as you root for the heroes, you're unsettled by the surveillance society that they represent. (They're unsettled, too. "We probably shouldn't have built it," Finch admits, allowing that the Machine might be a "beautiful" but "terrible" invention.) In many ways, "Person of Interest" is a show about atonement. {Read on New Yorker}

Dead Houbara bustards -- after a hunt by Arab royals in Pakistan's Sindh province.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 14:52:00 +0000

{Via Twitter}

This is an amazing moment that’s as crazy as it is brief.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 18:39:00 +0000

Sarajevo mourns a shoe-shine man

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 15:41:00 +0000

Around 2,000 people have signed a petition calling for the erection of a statue to Husein Hasani, the last shoe-shiner of Sarajevo - who plied his trade for decades, becoming a symbol of the city.

Several thousand people have asked the Sarajevo authorities to erect a statue to Husein Hasani, a much-loved shoe shiner who died on Monday of a heart attack aged 82.

"Uncle Miso was a legend of Sarajevo, the last shoeshiner on our streets," the online petition reads. "Throughout his life he was fair, he helped when he could, and he was one of the best people. He deserves his monument," it adds.

Miso plied his trade for decades on Sarajevo's central boulevard, Marshal Tito Street. On hearing news of his death, many people brought flowers and lit candles around the chair where he spent his days polishing away and chatting to rich and poor alike.

Miso was not unrecognised even during his lifetime. Several years ago, the city authorities awarded him an apartment.

The Mayor of Sarajevo, Ivo Komsic, recalled Miso as an icon of the city in which he had lived and worked for decades - which he had loved, and which loved him in return.

"Uncle Miso became a symbol of this city," said Komsic. "He use to say that he knew ministers and common workers, who all come to have their shoes cleaned and talk a bit."

Komsic added that Miso was a sort of a mayor of Sarajevo himself and that the city will miss him.

shoe-shiner of Sarajevo - who plied his trade for decades, becoming a symbol of the city.{Via Balkaninsight}

WaterWheel to ease burden on women

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 15:29:00 +0000

Girls and women carrying plastic jerry cans of water on their heads is a common sight in rural areas of poor countries. The WaterWheel eases that burden by storing water in a round 50-litre container that doubles as a wheel.

Designed after consultations with villagers in the dry northern Indian state of Rajasthan, the WaterWheel is made from high-quality plastic that can withstand rough terrain. It will sell for $25-$30, compared with $75-$100 for similar products.

"Our goal is to distribute on a large scale, on small margins to 10,000-20,000 customers a year," says Cynthia Koenig, founder and chief executive of Wello, a US social venture working on ways to deliver clean water in poor countries. Wello won a $100,000 Grand Challenges Canada prize to develop the WaterWheel.

The idea came from an exploratory trip to India in 2010 to ask what people thought of the idea of rolling water, instead of carrying it. "We were pleasantly surprised," Koenig says. "We returned a year later, worked in close collaboration with villages in Rajasthan, and kept coming back to the idea of rolling water. We were surprised the idea had so much traction - we never thought it would work in India."

The designers played around with different sizes - 10-20 litres - before agreeing on 50 litres. While the WaterWheel was created with women in mind, as they tend to collect water, Koenig says Wello has been surprised by its popularity among men.

"One of most exciting things is that men love using it, they see it as a tool," she adds. "Men take on the primary role so the women are freed up to do other things. Or the role is split so men use it four days a week and the women use it two days. It has reduced the burden on women. A nurse told me she is not late for work anymore because the husband collects the water."

The device, to be constructed Ahmedabad city in Gujarat, also saves time, at least an hour in many cases. It is also being used for irrigation and to bring water to animals.

Wello plans to sell the WaterWheel in the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat states, as well as explore opportunities for water purification. {Via The Guardian}

God that sounds sexy!

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 14:05:00 +0000

It's official: Reptiles can use tools to help them hunt.

New research shows that alligators and crocodiles can use small sticks to attract birds looking for nesting

materials. If the birds get too close, they become a meal. The behavior has so far been observed among American alligators in Louisiana, as well as mugger crocodiles (also known as marsh crocodiles) in India.

Alligators only engaged in this trickery during the nesting season and in areas where birds nested, said Vladimir Dinets, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. During nesting season, there's often a shortage of sticks in marshy areas where these reptiles and birds overlap, and birds sometimes even fight amongst themselves to procure sticks to build nests. The study, which Dinets co-authored and which was published in late November in the journal Ethology Ecology & Evolution, suggests that there is no other explanation for this behavior than as one of tool use.

"What's really remarkable - they are not only using lures, but they are timing it to just when the birds they want to capture are nesting and looking for sticks to use," said Gordon Burghardt, an ethologist (animal behaviorist) and comparative psychologist specializing in reptiles at UT-Knoxville. "They are making some assessment of the birds themselves."

An American alligator successfully lures a snowy egret with a stick, and then eats it, at St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida.Pin It An American alligator successfully lures a snowy egret with a stick, and then eats it, at St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida. Credit: Don SpechtView full size image "This is indeed the first convincing evidence of tool use in any reptile," said Burghardt, who wasn't involved in the study. [Alligator Alley: Pictures of Monster Reptiles]

The finding, along with other recent work, suggests reptiles are much more intelligent than generally acknowledged, Dinets said. As anybody who studies the beasts can attest, they are quite smart, he added. Crocodiles, for example, have complex communication systems, can hunt in coordination and ambush prey, and both parents may help raise young, he said.

Relatively less is known about crocodiles and alligators than many animals, because, as large predators, they are difficult to raise in the lab and study up close in the wild. Their cold-bloodedness also makes them slow.

"They operate on a different time scale; they do things more slowly," Burghardt said. "Sometimes we don't have the patience to let them strut their stuff, as it were ... so this kind of study is important."

Wading birds like snowy egrets have been known to nest in wooded islands near areas with high levels of alligators, for example in Florida. Scientists think the birds nest near such scaly enemies because the alligators keep at bay predators like snakes. Apparently, the occasional loss of adult birds to the hungry alligators, or nestlings that fall into the water, is worth the lowered risk of being eaten by something else, according to the study. {Via}

"The Royal Enfield Bullet, often described as the oldest continuously produced motorcycle in the world."

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 13:34:00 +0000

The Royal Enfield Bullet, often described as the oldest continuously produced motorcycle in the world, is a cult product for enthusiasts who love it for its vintage feel as much as for the thrum of its engine.

Muscular and pliant, the Bullet - an Indian-made avatar of an old British brand - has found renewed popularity over the last few years, as leisure motorcycling in India has blossomed. Its manufacturer, Royal Enfield Motors, sold almost 175,000 motorcycles - Bullets as well as three other brands - in 2013.

The company is now looking to push harder into British and American markets, hoping to follow in the wake of other Indian motor vehicle manufacturers that have competed hard with overseas brands even as their peers in other industries have struggled.

Royal Enfield's newest model, a midsize "cafe racer" called the Continental GT, was introduced at an elaborate event in London in September. "It's the first bike that we've developed keeping the world market in mind," said Siddhartha Lal, who is credited with turning Royal Enfield around.

Mr. Lal, age 40, is the chief executive of Eicher Motors, a manufacturer of buses, trucks and tractors that owns Royal Enfield. Uncommonly for an Indian executive, he sports sideburns and wears jeans and a bomber jacket to meetings. He was riding a Bullet when he was in university, well before Eicher, under his father's management, bought Royal Enfield in 1993.

The sale price was "just pennies," Mr. Lal said. Eicher reported revenue of more than $1 billion in 2012.

The Bullet was first produced by a British firm named Royal Enfield, but after that company shut down in 1971, its Indian manufacturing unit - in the city of Madras (now Chennai) - bought the rights to the name and continued to produce the Bullet.

But through the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Lal said, Royal Enfield's management made a series of bad decisions and buried the company in debt. "The motorcycle was still resilient, though. It was probably selling 1,500 or 2,000 pieces a month," he said. "Eicher bought Royal Enfield because at its core was the Bullet. That was the appeal."

Mr. Lal set himself to turn Royal Enfield around in 2000, when he was 27, and the company first sputtered and then roared back to life. Dan Holmes, who fell so in love with a Bullet he saw at a trade show that he opened a Royal Enfield dealership in Goshen, Ind., recalled how the quality of the motorcycles improved from the late 1990s through the 2000s.

"Eicher started investing real money into their bikes," Mr. Holmes said. The electric start grew more reliable while fuel injections and transmissions were revamped.

The Royal Enfield motorcycle, whose basic profile changed very little over the years, appealed to buyers, he said, because one could tinker endlessly with it. Jay Leno owns one, as does Billy Joel. Mr. Holmes himself owns what he calls "the two most modified Royal Enfields in the world," which he used to set speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2008.

As one of perhaps seven or eight exclusive Royal Enfield dealers in the United States back in the early 2000s, Mr. Holmes sold his motorcycles for $3,500 to $4,000 each, taking custody of them in dribs and drabs from a national distributor. In 2003, his best year, he sold 35 Royal Enfields.

Exports remain limited, although they are growing, and Mr. Lal is ambitious about scaling up. Last year, Royal Enfield exported 3,500 motorcycles. Six hundred of those went to America, its biggest overseas market.

Back in India, however, Royal Enfield has caught the beginning of a wave in leisure motorcycling. Kumar Kandaswami, a senior director at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India, said a split had emerged in the market, between riders who wanted light motorcycles just to commute and those who wanted the thrill of the machine itself.

"Even at a rough estimate, there are easily half a million buyers out there who want to use motorcycles for leisure," Mr. Kandaswami said. "There are active motorcycle communities now. Our highways have improved. People have more money to spend."

The vastness of this market attracted manufacturers like the British Triumph, which opened in India in 2013, and Harley-Davidson, which arrived in 2009. { Via NYT}

The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published In 1929.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 13:13:00 +0000

How José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses helps us understand everything from YouTube to

Yet I recently read The Revolt of the Masses again, and with a completely different response. The same ideas I dismissed as old-fashioned and out-of-date back in the 20th century now reveal an uncanny ability to explain the most peculiar happenings of the digital age.

Are you, like me, puzzled to learn that Popular Science magazine recently shut down comments on its website, declaring that they were bad for science? Are you amazed, like me, that Duck Dynasty is the most-watched nonfiction cable show in TV history? Are you dismayed, like me, that crappy Hollywood films about comic book heroes and defunct TV shows have taken over every movie theater? Are you depressed, like me, that symphony orchestras are declaring bankruptcy, but Justin Bieber earned $58 million last year?

If so, you need to read The Revolt of the Masses. You've got questions. Ortega's got answers.

First, let me tell you what you won't find in this book. Despite a title that promises political analysis, The Revolt of the Masses has almost nothing to say about conventional party ideologies and alignments. Ortega shows little interest in fascism or capitalism or Marxism, and this troubled me when I first read the book. (Although, in retrospect, the philosopher's passing comments on these matters proved remarkably prescient - for example his smug dismissal of Russian communism as destined to failure in the West, and his prediction of the rise of a European union.) Above all, he hardly acknowledges the existence of 'left' and 'right' in political debates.

Ortega's brilliant insight came in understanding that the battle between 'up' and 'down' could be as important in spurring social and cultural change as the conflict between 'left' and 'right'. This is not an economic distinction in Ortega's mind. The new conflict, he insists, is not between "hierarchically superior and inferior classes.... upper classes or lower classes." A millionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega's surprising schema. And a pauper might represent the elite.

The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age - or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elite still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.

He understands that the rise of new technological tools gives a global scope to the unformed opinions of people who, in a previous era, would have only focused on what was nearby and familiar. Above all, the favorite source of wisdom for the masses, in Ortega's schema, is their own strident opinions. "Why should he listen, when he has all the answers, everything he needs to know?" Ortega writes. "It is no longer the season to listen, but on the contrary, a time to pass judgment, to pronounce sentence, to issue proclamations."

Ortega couldn't have foreseen digital age culture, but he is describing it with precision. He would recognize the angry, assertive tone of comments on web articles as the exact same tendency he identified in 1929. He would understand why Yelp reviews have more influence than the considered judgments of restaurant reviewers. He would know why Amazon customer comments have more clout than critics in The New Yorker. He would attend an angry town hall meeting or listen to talk radio, and recognize the same tendencies he described in his book.

Recently I had dinner with a friend who is affluent, educated, and a noted wine connoisseur. We were talking about wine critic Robert Parker and other experts, and my friend asserted that he now relies more on wine advice from websites where anyone can post their evaluations of different vintages. And if the mass mentality has taken over wine-tasting, what can we expect from film reviews or rock criticism?

Of course, this rise of mass opinion comes at a cost. For example, music criticism is turning into lifestyle reporting. Even specialist magazines avoid dealing with any technical descriptions of what a performer is doing, and I have a hunch that the less critics know about the structure of music, the more likely they are to succeed today. This same tendency, outlined with precision by Ortega back in 1929, can be seen in numerous other fields where experts once reigned, but have now been replaced by the opinions of the masses.

Duck Dynasty. I first read José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses more than thirty years ago. I still remember how disappointed I was by this cantankerous book. I'd read other works by Ortega (1883-1955), and been impressed by the Spanish philosopher's intelligence and insight. But this 1929 study of the modern world, his most famous book, struck me as hopelessly nostalgic and elitist.{Read On} {BUY}

Dogs Poop in Alignment with Earth's Magnetic Field

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 13:03:00 +0000

Dogs seem to have an awful lot of ritual before hunkering down and soiling the sidewalk. It's not uncommon to see a dog owner - plastic bag in hand - rolling his eyes as his furry companion sniffs and spins, getting just so before hunkering down to do the least considerate thing possible.

But for whatever its worth, all that spinning is far from arbitrary. What dog owners witness is a small and

furry version of the aurora borealis and a link between species and environment that's as holistic and beautiful as a dog pooping can be. A team of Czech and German researchers found that dogs actually align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field when they poop.

Proving at least that they're really devoted to their work, the researchers measured the direction of the body axis of 70 dogs from 37 breeds during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years, and found that dogs "prefer to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions." They fittingly published their results in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.

You might wonder why dogs bother to do this, and uh, so do the researchers.

It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it 'consciously' (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs 'see,' 'hear' or 'smell' the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they 'feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable' in a certain direction). Our analysis of the raw data (not shown here) indicates that dogs not only prefer N-S direction, but at the same time they also avoid E-W direction.

This isn't the only example of animals seemingly sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Birds, turtles, and fish are known to use magnetic guidance while migrating. Cattle and deer are known to graze on a north-south axis - as with defecating dogs, this is magnetic north, not the geographic one. Some bats navigate using a magnetic compass and given the large ranges of the dog's closest relatives in the wild, wolves, scientists suspected that canines might also sense the magnetic field.

But this was perhaps the first time that magnetic sensitivity was proven in dogs, and it was also the first time that a predictable behavioral reaction to the fluctuations in the magnetic field - magnetic storms, often as resulting from solar flares - was proven in a mammal.

If you're out walking your dog later, and he sidles up and pees on a tree facing east-west, don't be terribly surprised. The magnetic consciousness was observed only in dogs off leash, in the middle of a field. All things considered, the owner matters more to the dog than the Earth's magnetic field; a nice little ego-booster that you'll need as you bend over to pick up warm dog droppings. {Via}

Legendary street artist Blek Le Rat. Without Blek, there would be no Banksy.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 14:18:00 +0000

Everybody has their own culture made up of what we have seen, learned, and loved in our lives. Some of us

carry the burden of one’s culture, others don’t … we need food to live, just as we need culture to develop ourselves.
I was educated by people who had received an education from the 19th century. My father was born in 1914 and my grandfather in 1880. So, my life was shaped by the culture and events of two different centuries. In my grandparents time, in the early 20th century, only a few people had access to culture. Culture was their destiny. They would write books, play music or do some acting for the educated elite.

Culture for the masses appeared with the arrival of the cinema. It opened the doors for the least-favoured because it was affordable. Almost everybody has the means to go to the movies. The democratisation of culture became even stronger when music was accessible to all, first in the US and later in Europe in the 1950s. I think the phenomenon of Street Art is a good thing, along with the internet which is a great tool for artists to make their own propaganda. It is just perfect for artists because every artist’s desire is to be seen by the whole world. The internet is the biggest cultural vector and radically ahead of the other media.

We are at a turning point of cultural diffusion. {Via}

Sleeping it off.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 13:33:00 +0000

A man sleeps off his celebratory drink after his rooster won a bloody duel at a cockfight in Sukma, Bastar.

Amazing footage: "Scenes of Jewish Life in Kerala, India (1937)"

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 09:36:00 +0000

Via Twitter @bintbattuta

Aasif Mandvi is a funny man

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 09:08:00 +0000

Hints of Islamist radicalism

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 08:20:00 +0000

Now that things have calmed down enough in Muzaffarnagar for the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi to

make a visit the time has come for some dispassionate analysis. Not just of what happened in this particular riot but of what could be happening in Muslim communities across India. In situations of communal tension we have become so accustomed to blaming Hindus that we could be missing something insidious and very dangerous. We could be missing signs of radicalisation in the Muslim community that we do not dare talk about because it is so politically incorrect especially in the aftermath of communal violence that usually results in the death of more Muslims than Hindus. In Muzaffarnagar it has been heartbreaking to see injured children and disturbing to see whole villages emptied of their residents because Muslims fear for their lives. This is why it is easier to blame administrative incompetence and Hindu perfidy than Islamic radicalisation for what happened. But, it is important to confront the reality of radicalization among Indian Muslims and try and deal with it or consequences for the future are likely to be too awful to contemplate.

More than a bit of radicalisation

In the name of 'secularism' neither the government of Akhilesh Yadav nor the Sonia-Manmohan government in Delhi are likely to accept that behind the violence in Muzaffarnagar lies a deeper, darker reality. It manifested itself in the violence with which Muslims responded when the two young Jat men came seeking to avenge their sister's honour. And, it manifested itself in the rumours that Muslim rioters in the area used automatic weapons to attack Hindus and security forces. Details remain so murky of what actually happened that I called a retired police officer in Lucknow whose analysis I trust and asked him if he had heard that automatic weapons were used. He said he had.

This led inevitably to my next question. Did he think there was a bit of radicalisation among Muslims in this part of western Uttar Pradesh? This is how he answered. 'What do you mean a bit of radicalisation? Have you never heard of the Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband? This is all the same area and for many years now there has been evidence of jihadi elements and of all kinds of weapons being smuggled into the districts of Muzzafarnagar and Shaamli...so yes there is more than a bit of radicalisation and it has been there since the late eighties, early nineties.'

Remember that it was in a village in western UP, not far from here, where Omar Sheikh imprisoned his foreign hostages in 1994. He was arrested in connection with the kidnappings and remained in an Indian jail cell till he was released in exchange for the passengers of IC-814 five years later. He went on to organise the beheading of Daniel Pearl and other acts of jihadi violence.

My point is that the ugly, crowded town of Muzaffarnagar, and its surrounding villages, has long been a hotbed for jihadi violence. It is unfortunate that the media has not gone into this aspect of what happened. All we have had so far are tirades on national TV about how politicians are exploiting the situation for petty political gains. That is an old story. They always do. The new element is the sinister influences of the international jihad and the inability of the 'secular' government of Uttar Pradesh to do anything about this or to deal with situations of communal tension with an even hand. From all accounts an even hand was absent in the way in which the Muzaffarnagar violence was handled.

The Samajwadi Party government in Lucknow appears to have been tougher on the Hindu community without having managed to impress Muslims by doing this. The most prominent Muslim in the Uttar Pradesh government, Azam Khan, has made his anger public and Muslim organisations in UP have said clearly that they believe that since the Samajwadi government took power eighteen months ago there have been deliberate attempts to polarize Hindus and Muslims. {Read on}

The album Led Zeppelin recorded before they recorded Led Zeppelin!

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 15:29:00 +0000

{Via}

A 16 year old from Mongolia aced an online course of M.I T at 15

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 12:44:00 +0000

Days before I was to meet Battushig Myanganbayar at his home in Mongolia, he sent me an e-mail with a modest request: Would I bring him a pair of tiny XBee wireless antennas? Electronic parts are scarce in Mongolia (he used components from old elevators for some of his projects), and packages ordered online take weeks to show up.

When I arrived, antennas in hand, at his apartment in the middle-class neighborhood of Khan Uul, in Ulan Bator, Battushig, 16, led me down a steep incline into the building's underground garage to show me what they were for. Many children in the city play in their apartment buildings' driveways, but this one seemed oriented in a particularly dangerous way. Battushig worried about his 10-year-old sister and her friends being hit by an exiting car. Standing in the concrete space, its aqua walls nicked, he pointed overhead to a white box containing a sensor from which he had run wires to a siren with a flashing red light outside in the building's driveway. His Garage Siren gave his sister and the other children time to get out of the way when a car was coming.

Battushig, playing the role of the car, moved into the sensor's path to show me how it worked, but it was clear he was not entirely satisfied with his design. "The use of the long wires is very inconvenient for my users," he said, almost apologetically, clasping his hands together in emphasis. He realized that contractors would be reluctant to install the siren in other buildings if they had to deal with cumbersome wiring, so he was developing a wireless version. Thus, the antennas.

Battushig has the round cheeks of a young boy, but he is not your typical teenager. He hasn't read Harry Potter ("What will I learn from that?") and doesn't like listening to music (when a friend saw him wearing headphones, he couldn't believe it; it turned out Battushig was preparing for the SAT). His projects are what make him happy. "In electrical engineering, there is no limit," he said. "It is like playing with toys." He unveiled Garage Siren in August 2012, posting instructions and a demonstration video on YouTube. The project impressed officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - where Battushig planned to apply for college - but at that point they were already aware of his abilities. Two months earlier, Battushig, then 15, became one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at M.I.T. and the first Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC - a college course filmed and broadcast free or nearly free to anyone with an Internet connection - offered by the university.

How does a student from a country in which a third of the population is nomadic, living in round white felt tents called gers on the vast steppe, ace an M.I.T. course even though nothing like this is typically taught in Mongolian? schools? The answer has to do with Battushig's extraordinary abilities, of course, but also with the ambitions of his high-school principal. Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the principal of the Sant School, was the first Mongolian to graduate from M.I.T., in 2009, and he has tried since then to bring science and technology labs to his students. "My vision," he told me, "is to have more skilled engineers to develop Mongolia. To do that, everything has to start from the beginning." In the past decade, Mongolia, which had limited landlines, invested heavily in its information technology infrastructure and now has an extensive 3G network. Most homes in Ulan Bator have Internet connections, and almost everyone, including nomads, has at least one cellphone. Even on the steppe, with only sheep in sight, you can get a signal. {Read on}

Vasily Ilyn. His first journey to see the world.

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 16:43:00 +0000

What happens when prisoners breed endangered butterflies

noreply@blogger.com (treebeard31) — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 04:44:00 +0000

An endangered species of butterfly has found an unusual set of champions — the inmates of the Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Washington.

While the number of Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies has dwindled in Washington in recent years, the Mission Creek inmates are working hard to help the species rebound, reports the Nature magazine blog. By breeding the butterflies in a greenhouse outside the prison, the inmates released more than 800 butterflies into the wild this year, while other local prison groups pitched in efforts to conserve the plants that these butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on. So far, the Mission Creek inmates have raised more than 3,600 caterpillars for next year’s release.

The Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly revival is a part of the Sustainability in Prisons Project, the creation of frequent TED speaker Nalini Nadkarni. Below, check out Nalini’s powerful TEDTalks, on researching animals that thrive in rainforest canopies and on bringing appreciation of nature into prisons. {Read on TED Blog}