Under the Radar: December 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006

New Year's Eve 2006 in Tokyo

Many shops put up shimekazari and posters saying "Kin ga shin nen" or "Gassho" (Happy New Year).

Kadomatsu (gate pines) are put near entrances to houses and businesses.

Light fades across the town.

The Moon at sunset.

The Sun sets behind Mount Fuji on the last day of the year.

The Sun sets and 2006 draws to a close.

"For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Middlemarch
Geroge Eliot

The Sun sets behind Mount Fuji, December 31, 2006

Friday, December 29, 2006

The Woman of the Island of the Blue Dolphin

San Nicholas Island is just 70 miles off the coast of Los Angeles.

The island had been inhabited for 8,000 years by native Americans, but by 1835, only one remained. She lived there alone, dressed only in cormorant feathers, for 18 years. The irony of the events will make you weep.

Read the story first, then watch the video.

http://www.latimes.com/features/la-os-island15jun15,1,1046257.story?page=1

This is why I just throw away my pillow every new year and buy another one

http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id=2092092005

If you wanna have a good laugh...

Go to iTunes and look for "one hit wonders". I warn you, this will consume days of your time once you get started...

Don't miss the 3D Cosmic Collisions show at the American Museum of Natural History in New York

Don't miss the renovated Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New Yorkhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif. The current show is Cosmic Collisions. The simulation of the formation of the Moon is spectacular. When you project a movie onto a curved screen, like a planetarium dome, your brain automatically turns it into 3D without the need for special glasses. I went to see it twice! Here is a preview. You can save the video clip by clicking on the small black triangle at the bottom right of the trailer window, and then you can see it full screen.

http://amnh.com/rose/spaceshow/cosmic/trailer.php

Suppose you were a nice, tasty octopus walking along the sea floor...

You could walk on two legs and pretend you are a coconut.

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/9999/rolling.mpeg

You could walk like an Egyptian walking in multiple directions and pretend you are seaweed.

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/9999/walking.mpeg

Monday, December 25, 2006

On Christmas eve, a hundred years ago...

The first wireless broadcast of entertainment was received by radio operators across the North and South Atlantic. Reginald Fessenden played O Holy Night on the violin and read a passage from the Bible, broadcasting from Brant Rock Massachusettes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Fessenden

Sunday, December 17, 2006

What if, for a dollar, you could raise the IQ of a child by 10 to 15 points?

“For 5 cents per person per year, you can make the whole population smarter than before” --Dr. Gerald N. Burrow, former dean of the Yale Medical School

For want of 5 cents of iodine per person per year, two billion people, mostly in Asia, Europe (including Spain, France, Germany, and Italy), Africa, and Australia suffer from goiter, dwarfism, and mental retardation.

This is a good example of how a very minor tweaking that costs almost nothing can have a huge effect on the growing good of the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html

If the link does not work, go to www.nytimes.com and search for
"On the Brink: In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt"

If you have to register, I highly recommend it. You will not receive spam, and you really should be able to read the New York Times online anyway.

Friday, December 15, 2006

The Sun Dagger

In Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, on the south side of Fajada Butte, there is the most astounding astronomical device I have ever seen.

Three large slabs of stone were positioned on the south side of the upper part of the Butte by the Anasazi more than 1,000 years ago.

Below the three slabs are two spiral markings on the rock face: a large spiral and a small spiral to the upper left.

On the first day of winter at noon, sunlight passing between the slabs is projected as a pair of daggers that move from above on either side of the large spiral.
On the first day of spring at noon, a large dagger of light passes through the large spiral and a small dagger of light passes through the small spiral.
On the first day of summer at noon, a single dagger of light passes through the middle of the large spiral.
On the first day of autumn at noon, again as in spring, a large dagger of light passes through the large spiral and a small dagger of light passes through the small spiral.
The degree to which the slabs would have to be formed and positioned in order for this to happen, by people without writing, is simply astonishing.

But that is not all! The Moon goes through a complicated 19-year cycle as it moves across the sky. Sometimes it rises and sets far in the southern and northern sky (called the major standstill), and sometimes it rises and sets nearer due east and west (called the minor standstill). When the Moon rises at Chaco Canyon at the major standstill, the edge of the moonlight touches just the left edge of the large spiral; when the Moon is at the minor standstill, the edge of the moonlight passes through the center of the spiral; and when the Moon is between these two extremes, the edge of the moonlight touches the right side of the large spiral! And there are 19 turns of the spiral!

So there you have it. On a single space at the top of a butte with a spectacular view of Chaco Canyon is the perfect meeting of the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and Time.

You can see Fajada Butte from space at this site. Click on the + sign in the box in the upper left and you will move in closer and closer.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=36.018889,-107.909722&spn=0.1,0.1&t=k&q=36.018889,-107.909722

For a full explanation, see http://www.solsticeproject.org/lunarmark.htm

For a fascinating explanation of the discovery and how the device works, look for the documentary narrated by Robert Redford called "The Sun Dagger". Available online for about 12 dollars used from major online bookstores.

If you think you know how to blow bubbles...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I4VKj4d0WI

Ever have to move a table by yourself?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR931mtC3l4

Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota is apparently suffering from an arteriovenous malformation.

http://neuro.wehealny.org/endo/cond_arteriovenous.asp

Monday, December 4, 2006

Stardust reentry

Imagine you are on an airplane not too far from the reentry path of the fastest object ever made bhttp://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gify the hands of Man...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm3Kl_8dkTk

Animation of the reentry
http://www.nasa.gov/mov/139828main_stardust-edl.mov

Project webpage
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

ISBN-13: 978-0295985350

みなしご元禄津波
The Orphan Tsunami of 1700

One winter's night in the year 1700, a mysterious tsunami flooded fields and washed away houses in Japan. It arrived without the warning that a nearby earthquake usually provides. Samurai, merchants, and villagers recorded the event, but nearly three centuries would pass before discoveries in North America revealed the tsunami's source.

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 tells this scientific detective story through clues from both sides of the Pacific. The evidence uncovered tells of a [magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest] a century before Lewis and Clark...

You can see a summary at
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/

http://www.amazon.com/Orphan-Tsunami-1700-Japanese-Earthquake/dp/0295985356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204357404&sr=1-1

Video simulation of the megaquake.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=72698052150208427&q=pacific+northwest+megaquake&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Map of simulation of the megaquake.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/supercomputer/02-08Virtual90Megaquake.asp

A tsunami is unlike any "wave" you have ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jixyBvjJZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl8giZ66j7o

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

Liberal, optimistic, exhilarating. The most spectacular lectures you will ever see.

www.ted.com

Try these to start

The best presentation ever... legendary... your view of the world will change in many ways... and there will be hope...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

The World Now Eats (and Dies) Like Americans
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/10

Extremely graphic... even made me queasy... but you cannot understand the light without knowing the darkness...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/142

The Law of ACCELERTING Returns

You have probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns: more effort gets you only marginal increase in reward (for example, if you exercise for half an hour a day, you get most of the health benefits; if you exercise for an hour a day, you get almost all of the health benefits; and exercising for two, three, or four hours a day will give very little added health benefits).

However, there are situations in which reward does not diminish (at least for a long while) and actually speeds up over time. People tend to see progress in technology as proceeding in a linear fashion, so they expect the 21st century (barring something truly unfortunate) to progress something like the way the 20th century did. But according to Ray Kurzweil, the technical progress in the 21st century will be more like 1,000 times that of the 20th century.

Here is an example. Cost to read the DNA of one person
in 1990: 3 billion dollars
in 2005: 2 million dollars
in 2006: 200,000 dollars
target for 2010-2015: 1,000 dollars

Being able to read your DNA will allow medical treatments to be tailored specifically for you, vastly improving outcomes.

This BBC Horizon program is, granted, sensational infotainment, but it is probably the most efficient introduction to this topic.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3882715179234602208&q=human+v2.0&hl=en

The article below is very long, and there may be parts that are difficult to follow, but look over the entire article because it is a map of the world we are already living in, and it shows what looms up the road.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Step 1: Slow the ageing process

Something that humans have seen only once is about to happen again: functional lifespan will vastly increase.

This happened the first time in the 20th century with improvements in public health, sanitation, nutrition, vaccination, and pharmaceuticals. Someone from the 19th century would not believe how low our risk of death is, how free of disability and pain we are, and how long we live now. Things are hardly perfect, but to all humans who lived before the early 1900s, the world we live in now would be an unbelievable paradise.

In the next leap, we will not only live even longer, but disease and disability will often be delayed by years if not decades. If we can just make it through the next 15 years or so, the interventions will be unbelievable. It is quite possible that many of us, even those in middle age, will live to see the dawn of the 22nd century, looking and feeling like 40. I am not joking.

So, how do we improve our chances of getting there? Doing basic things to take care of your health is obvious, but there are other things that can be done.

We have known for 70 years how to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of the diseases of old age: eat less. Or more exactly, reduce the number of calories while maintaining adequate amounts of protein, fats, vitamins, and other nutrients. The difference is shocking, and it has been shown in animals from ameba to monkeys without exception. Basically, when calories are low, cells turn on genes that fix damage, so you age more slowly. Fasting at least once a month seems to produce most of the desired effect.

If you have not seen this New York Times article, take a look at the monkeys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/health/nutrition/31agin.html?ex=1163480400&en=193a4a4fe169ec69&ei=5070

The monkeys are both about 25 years old. The one on the right ate a normal diet and is old, frail, gray, scruffy, and has the shrunken skull of an old monkey (like a 90 year old human). The one on the left ate a diet with the same nutrients, but with about 30 percent fewer calories. The contrast is shocking. The monkey that ate fewer calories still looks young and healthy (like a 60 year old human).

So, step one is avoid excess calories, especially from sugar, white bread, white rice, and white potatoes.

But the amount by which you have to reduce calories is quite difficult for most people to maintain. Is there another way we can turn on the damage repair genes? The answer seems to be yes.

Throughout human evolution, we have always eaten plants that were far from perfect. They were drought stressed, attacked by fungi, and attacked by insects. Ironically, this seems to have been good for us. When plants are attacked or do not receive enough water, they produce huge numbers of chemicals to defend themselves. In seasons when there were a lot of these chemicals in plants, animals eating the plants used that as a signal that hard times may be coming, so their cells turned on the damage control genes to protect what the cells already had. We also did not have steady supplies of food, so whenever we didn't eat for a day, again the damage control genes turned on. Specifically, unnecessary molecular tags are removed from the DNA, returning gene expression to the way it was when we were younger. In modern life, all the plants we eat are completely protected from fungi and insects and are watered carefully. All the stress response chemicals that they would normally produce are not there. We never go for a day without eating. Therefore, our damage control genes are never turned on, so the molecular tags on our DNA become more and more different from the way they were when we were young, our gene expression becomes more abnormal, and we age at a high rate.

If we consume chemicals that plants make in response to stress, it turns on the damage control genes, and voila, the effect is the same as caloric restriction, although it is unclear what dose is necessary. One chemical that has been shown to turn on damage control genes is resveratrol, which is found in the skin of grapes, especially when the grape plants are stressed by drought or fungus infection, and is found in many other plants as well. Since people who drink red wine made from grapes harvested and processed in the French way seemed to have extremely low levels of heart disease, researchers tried screening red wines from France to find out if there were compounds which produced the effect. Resveratrol is the most potent found so far. When given to laboratory animals, it slows ageing by 20% and even much more, and it decreases risk of cancer by up to 70%. Further evidence comes from numerous studies showing that consumption of 3 glasses of red wine per week is associated with 70% reduction in colon cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and other cancers.

I have been taking resveratrol for two years now, and I think the effects are apparent. When I stopped for 6 months because I ran out, the skin started to look old and wrinkled. Resveratrol is easily destroyed by exposure to air, heat, and light. I take the one from Longevinex at
http://www.longevinex.com
because it seems to be the most biologically active. It costs about a dollar a day, which is much cheaper than a glass of wine, though much less fun, so I do both.

These results are not obscure, but you may not have heard about them. Do a Google search for any of these topics and you will find thousands of hits.

So, step 1, let's at least do simple basic things to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of serious diseases of old age. You may be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. 万歳！

Under the Radar