Spectacular prehistoric depictions of animal and human figures created up to 6,000 years ago on Western Saharan rocks have been vandalised by United Nations peacekeepers, The Times has learnt.
Read more here.
Friday, February 01, 2008
God is NOT on your side
Remote-controlled explosives strapped to two mentally retarded women detonated in a coordinated attack on Baghdad pet bazaars Friday, Iraqi officials said, killing at least 73 people in the deadliest day since the U.S. sent 30,000 extra troops to the capital last spring.
Read more in disgust here.
Read more in disgust here.
Teaching Patriotism
Ekk
The subject of teaching Britishness in schools has taken a fresh twist with claims that patriotism should be taught as a "controversial issue".
The government wants children to develop a sense of British identity through history lessons.
But academics at the Institute of Education say pupils should not be encouraged to love Britain because it has a "morally ambiguous" history.
They also found just 9% of teachers think schools should teach patriotism.
Read more here.
The subject of teaching Britishness in schools has taken a fresh twist with claims that patriotism should be taught as a "controversial issue".
The government wants children to develop a sense of British identity through history lessons.
But academics at the Institute of Education say pupils should not be encouraged to love Britain because it has a "morally ambiguous" history.
They also found just 9% of teachers think schools should teach patriotism.
Read more here.
Not that Beatle song
Scientists are planning to beam a Beatles song into space.
NASA plans to blast The Beatles' song "Across the Universe" into deep space in order to serenade otherworldly beings hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away with our very best pop music.
Nice idea. Too bad it's one of the crappier Beatle songs.
NASA plans to blast The Beatles' song "Across the Universe" into deep space in order to serenade otherworldly beings hundreds, thousands or millions of light years away with our very best pop music.
Nice idea. Too bad it's one of the crappier Beatle songs.
Carnival!
And for one of the sickest stories of the week (via shakespearessister)...
Next week, Brazilians will rise as one, and party their asses off. Yes, Carnival is coming, and nowhere on Earth is it celebrated with as much verve and style as in Brazil.
The best part of this year's Carnival? No floats about the Holocaust with a dancing Hitler on top. At least, not for a lack of trying.
You see, a big part of Carnival here is the Samba school competition. They have huge competitions both in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, they are televised, and they are a huge part of the lives of many Brazilians. It's a BIG deal, basically. Each Samba school will have hundreds and hundreds of dancers, drummers, and workers to make their Theme come to life.
It seems that a Samba school called Viradouro was planning on making its theme "É de arrepiar" which, loosely translated is "It's Shocking." One of their floats was to be dedicated to the Holocaust and was to be adorned with a pile of dead bodies (not real ones, mind you) with a dancing Hitler on top of it all.
Basically, what happened was, all the schools are required to tell what their theme will be beforehand. When this came out, the Jewish Federation in Brazil asked Viradouro to at least make one change - to put a sign saying "Never again" on the float. The school said no. So, they took it to court, where a judge said the school could not use the float, or any Hitlers, and that Carnival wasn't really the appropriate place for a dissection of the barbarities of the Holocaust
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Blue eyes result of ancient genetic 'mutation'
Frank Sinatra, Stephen Hawking, Marie Curie and Stephen Fry all owe their blue eyes to a genetic mutation that likely occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, researchers say.
Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today.
Read more here.
Scientists believe they have tracked down the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans on the planet today.
Read more here.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Driver drops bid to sue family of boy he killed
Just when you thought people couldn't go any lower...
A Spanish businessman withdrew a controversial lawsuit Wednesday against the family of a teenage boy he struck and killed while driving a luxury car.
Tomas Delgado had filed a suit asking the dead boy's parents to pay him €20,000 ($29,400) on the grounds that the collision that killed their teenage son also damaged his Audi A-8.
Read more here.
A Spanish businessman withdrew a controversial lawsuit Wednesday against the family of a teenage boy he struck and killed while driving a luxury car.
Tomas Delgado had filed a suit asking the dead boy's parents to pay him €20,000 ($29,400) on the grounds that the collision that killed their teenage son also damaged his Audi A-8.
Read more here.
Æ, Ø and Å, three letters the world can't understand
Computers and globalisation could spell the demise of the three letters that distinguish the Danish alphabet
Tacked onto the end of the Danish alphabet, the special Danish letters 'æ', 'ø' and 'å' are threatened in a globalised world where the English language's dominance grows daily and where linguistic idiosyncrasies slow the internet's lightning fast communication, reports 24timer newspaper.
The telltale signs of standardisation have already appeared, concerned linguists point out. Denmark's largest corporation has erased the line in its 'ø' split apart the 'æ' in its name and now calls itself 'A.P. Moller-Maersk', for example. And any scholar named 'Søren' knows it's easiest to just use an 'o' when attending conferences abroad.
Read more here.
Tacked onto the end of the Danish alphabet, the special Danish letters 'æ', 'ø' and 'å' are threatened in a globalised world where the English language's dominance grows daily and where linguistic idiosyncrasies slow the internet's lightning fast communication, reports 24timer newspaper.
The telltale signs of standardisation have already appeared, concerned linguists point out. Denmark's largest corporation has erased the line in its 'ø' split apart the 'æ' in its name and now calls itself 'A.P. Moller-Maersk', for example. And any scholar named 'Søren' knows it's easiest to just use an 'o' when attending conferences abroad.
Read more here.
IPhone unlockers a concern for Wall Street
Duh, I guess people just don't like being locked in...and spied on...
A significant number of customers appear to be buying Apple Inc.'s popular iPhone with the intention of "unlocking" the device to use on a range of wireless networks.
Read more here.
A significant number of customers appear to be buying Apple Inc.'s popular iPhone with the intention of "unlocking" the device to use on a range of wireless networks.
Read more here.
Unlocking Mysteries of the Parthenon
During the past 2,500 years, the Parthenon—the apotheosis of ancient Greek architecture—has been rocked by earthquakes, set on fire, shattered by exploding gunpowder, looted for its stunning sculptures and defaced by misguided preservation efforts. Amazingly, the ancient Athenians built the Parthenon in just eight or nine years. Repairing it is taking a bit longer.
Read more here.
Read more here.
How birds swarm
The article is called "Study of starling formations points way for swarming robots" and even mentions robots in the first sentence, but the article really has nothing to do with robots...
Scientists have uncovered a simple rule that explains how thousands of starlings flock in formation and hope to use the discovery in the future to coordinate swarms of robots.
The reasons why the starlings are able to fly with Red Arrow precision in vast numbers, tumbling and banking in nervous unison and without colliding, has tantalised scientists.
Now it turns out that the secret is for each bird to track seven others, says the first detailed direct observations to have been reported by STARFLAG - Starlings in Flight - a European project involving biologists, physicists, and economists.
Read more here.
Scientists have uncovered a simple rule that explains how thousands of starlings flock in formation and hope to use the discovery in the future to coordinate swarms of robots.
The reasons why the starlings are able to fly with Red Arrow precision in vast numbers, tumbling and banking in nervous unison and without colliding, has tantalised scientists.
Now it turns out that the secret is for each bird to track seven others, says the first detailed direct observations to have been reported by STARFLAG - Starlings in Flight - a European project involving biologists, physicists, and economists.
Read more here.
Apple Prohibits Movie Rentals on Recent iPods
Apple's recent trend of fucking the customer over aggressive marketing, strikes again...
A number of iPod owners have discovered that their recently purchased iPods won't work with Apple's new iTunes video rentals, even though the iPods have video playback capabilities.
As of Tuesday, the issue had been raised multiple times in Apple's support forums. So far the company's only response has been to confirm that movie rentals work only with the iPhone, iPod touch, iPod classic and the third-generation iPod nano. Earlier iPods, including fifth-generation iPods sold before the September 2007 release of the sixth-generation iPod classic, are incompatible with rented videos.
"This is false advertising," says Raymond Blanchard, a disgruntled iPod owner. "I demand an upgrade or fix."
Read more here.
A number of iPod owners have discovered that their recently purchased iPods won't work with Apple's new iTunes video rentals, even though the iPods have video playback capabilities.
As of Tuesday, the issue had been raised multiple times in Apple's support forums. So far the company's only response has been to confirm that movie rentals work only with the iPhone, iPod touch, iPod classic and the third-generation iPod nano. Earlier iPods, including fifth-generation iPods sold before the September 2007 release of the sixth-generation iPod classic, are incompatible with rented videos.
"This is false advertising," says Raymond Blanchard, a disgruntled iPod owner. "I demand an upgrade or fix."
Read more here.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Most Americans are in cell phone jail
Story is much the same here in Toronto, under the thumb of the corporations lovingly known as "Fucking Rogers" and "Fucking Bell".
At any given time, most Americans are in cell phone jail.
You know the feeling. You talk to a friend with a snazzy new handset that does amazing things. Or you see an advertisement for a great deal on a monthly plan. Then what do you do?
You sigh, wistfully wishing you could shop for a new phone. If you are really on top of things, you call your provider and ask when your current cell phone contract expires. And then you wait.
Read more here.
At any given time, most Americans are in cell phone jail.
You know the feeling. You talk to a friend with a snazzy new handset that does amazing things. Or you see an advertisement for a great deal on a monthly plan. Then what do you do?
You sigh, wistfully wishing you could shop for a new phone. If you are really on top of things, you call your provider and ask when your current cell phone contract expires. And then you wait.
Read more here.
The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel
from 30000yearsofart.blogspot.comThe Lion man (in German: Löwenmensch) is a lion-headed ivory sculpture which is one of the oldest known sculptures in the world (the oldest animorphic sculpture). The figurine was determined to be about 32,000 years old using the C14 method on carbon bearing material from the same layer.
Its pieces were found in 1939 in a cave named Stadel im Hohlenstein in the Lonetal (Lone valley) Swabian Alb, Germany. Due to the beginning of the Second World War, it was forgotten and only rediscovered 30 years later. The first reconstruction revealed a humanoid figurine without head. In 1997/98 further pieces of the puzzle were discovered and the head was reassembled and restored.
via utexas.edu
The sculpture is 29.6 cm (11.7 inches) in height, 5.6 cm wide and 5,9 cm thick. It was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife. There are seven parallel, horizontal carved gouges on the left arm. It was originally classified as a male, later as a female, but both interpretations lack scientific evidence. At last it is often called lion headed figurine, or - probably wrong but easy to remember - lion man.
Interpretation is very difficult. There are certain similarities to French cave wall paintings, which also show hybrid creatures. These, however, are several thousand years younger. Meanwhile a similar, but smaller, lion-headed sculpture has been found in another cave in the same region, along with other animal figures. This leads to the possibility, that the lion-man played an important role in the mythology of humans of the early Paleolithic.
From "The Mind in the Cave" David Lewis Williams 2002
...the statuettes were associated with an early form of shamanism: 'entering an altered state of consciousness is often considered a dangerous activity' and 'shamans have to be strong and powerful to...perform the work they do'...transformation into an animal is an integral part of shamanism. In providing social and conceptual contexts for the statuettes...the comparatively segregated locations in which the objects were found and suggest that Aurignacian shamans may have performed their tasks in relative seclusion, though the statuettes' use as pendants also suggests that they had a public significance.
A Conservative American's reasoning on being a prick
I ran across this blog post on Blue Collar Muse:
Gay Marriage Doesn’t Involve Rights …
In which the American author responds to this statement in a post:
“You’re talking about being against basic civil rights [in regards to gay marriage].”
He or she then proceeds to justify the conservative view on the topic, which contains this gem:
I do not mean to make light of the feelings and desires of homosexuals who find themselves in the unfortunate situation of being unable to marry. But twisting the argument into a civil rights case in order to acquire a non-existent right for themselves is not something I’m prepared to participate in. It seems likely supporters of gay marriage will respond they are not talking about a right to marry but about discrimination. In which case I must respond in order to be discriminated against, there must be something you are able to do which you are being prevented from doing because you are gay. Thus there is no discrimination here since homosexuals are unable to marry.
The tortured logic of this paragraph is painful enough, but if brave, try reading the whole thing here. There are many more painful examples where that came from.
Nutshell arguement: Cultures [and the author of said piece, nose held firmly in air] have traditionally been able to discriminate against homosexuals, so how dare they now ask for that to stop. Really, some people are so uppity...
Gay Marriage Doesn’t Involve Rights …
In which the American author responds to this statement in a post:
“You’re talking about being against basic civil rights [in regards to gay marriage].”
He or she then proceeds to justify the conservative view on the topic, which contains this gem:
I do not mean to make light of the feelings and desires of homosexuals who find themselves in the unfortunate situation of being unable to marry. But twisting the argument into a civil rights case in order to acquire a non-existent right for themselves is not something I’m prepared to participate in. It seems likely supporters of gay marriage will respond they are not talking about a right to marry but about discrimination. In which case I must respond in order to be discriminated against, there must be something you are able to do which you are being prevented from doing because you are gay. Thus there is no discrimination here since homosexuals are unable to marry.
The tortured logic of this paragraph is painful enough, but if brave, try reading the whole thing here. There are many more painful examples where that came from.
Nutshell arguement: Cultures [and the author of said piece, nose held firmly in air] have traditionally been able to discriminate against homosexuals, so how dare they now ask for that to stop. Really, some people are so uppity...
Leaked UK gov't doc reveals plan to "coerce" Brits into national ID register
Via Boing Boing:
Phil from the UK anti-ID-register group NO2ID sends in this nugget -- note the call to action there. We've got a sensitive government document revealing the British government's plan to trick us into a database state and we need as many copies as possible, as quickly as possible!
1.2MB PDF Link
UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about "coercing" its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The 'ID card' is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident - creating what NO2ID calls 'the database state'.
NO2ID's national coordinator, Phil Booth, exhorted bloggers, freedom lovers and anyone who gives a damn about personal privacy to mirror the annotated document on their site.
"The charade is over. While ministers try to bamboozle the British public with fairytales about fingerprints, officials are plotting how to dupe and bully the population into surrendering control of their own identities."
"Biometric ID cards are a sham; a magician's flourish to cover the biggest identity fraud there has ever been."
Phil from the UK anti-ID-register group NO2ID sends in this nugget -- note the call to action there. We've got a sensitive government document revealing the British government's plan to trick us into a database state and we need as many copies as possible, as quickly as possible!
1.2MB PDF Link
UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about "coercing" its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The 'ID card' is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident - creating what NO2ID calls 'the database state'.
NO2ID's national coordinator, Phil Booth, exhorted bloggers, freedom lovers and anyone who gives a damn about personal privacy to mirror the annotated document on their site.
"The charade is over. While ministers try to bamboozle the British public with fairytales about fingerprints, officials are plotting how to dupe and bully the population into surrendering control of their own identities."
"Biometric ID cards are a sham; a magician's flourish to cover the biggest identity fraud there has ever been."
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