Under the Radar: June 2007

Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Sun is a variable star

All stars are variable in their energy outputs. Sometimes their outputs vary by a little, and sometimes by a lot.

The Sun is a variable star. Its output normally varies by about a tenth of a percent over several years, and it can sometimes suddenly become much brighter when a solar flare is aimed straight at the Earth.

Although we have managed to raise the amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere higher than they have been in 600,000 years (which sounds like a really really bad idea to me) by burning so much gas, oil, and coal, it seems the Sun may go through one of its low-output phases over the next decade or so, and give us some breathing room... Of course, if we keep burning fossil fuels as we have been and the concentrations of greenhouse gases go up even more during this lull, the problem will just be all the worse when the Sun brightens up again...

The June Solstice, June 21

Today, the northern hemisphere of the Earth is most tipped toward the Sun. It is the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere, and the first day of winter in the southern hemisphere. The northern hemisphere is receiving the most sunlight at this time of year, so it is warming up, even though we are actually farther from the Sun now than in our winter.

This day is often called the Summer Solstice, but since it is also the Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere, that can be confusing. Sky and Telescope therefore now refers to it as the "June Solstice" to avoid confusion.

Friday, June 15, 2007

The end of the control of knowledge as a commodity

A huge change is coming to the way information is accessed and used. Information is already essentially free and can be found on demand.

With free information, what will remain will be the eternal problems of what to look at, deciding what it means, and distinguishing what is likely to be true from what is not. That will still take a lifetime.

See "The End of the Commoditization of Knowledge" and at least read the first paragraph.

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_4.html

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Thought for today

FTD does not deliver across the River Styx.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

40 ago, whites were allowed to marry nonwhites in the US

Sometimes the unfairness of the world is just breathtaking.

Richard and Mildred Loving were not allowed to marry in 1958 in Virginia by anti-miscegenation laws. They married in Washington DC where it was legal for them to do so. When they returned to Virginia, they were arrested and banished from the state.

Judge Leon Bazile wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned their conviction and the Lovings were allowed to go home to Virginia.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10889047

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Gilligan's Island Theme you have never heard

Unaired pilot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJZ5YZ4qmD0

Japanese Gardens

http://learn.bowdoin.edu/japanesegardens/gardens/intro/index.html

"Spontaneous" Human Combustion Really Does Happen!

Unfortunately, it is not like on the X-Files where people burst into flames. Darn. (Otherwise there would be quite a number of piles of ash here and there.)

When a person or animal with a sufficient amount of body fat is covered in clothing or cloth, and if the material is set alight under certain conditions, the material can act like a wick and the body will burn slowly over many hours. Sometimes only a leg is found with everything else reduced to ash.

Here are some picturs. WARNING: They are quite gruesome.

http://paranormal.about.com/library/blclassic_shc.htm

http://www.weird-websites.com/weird_news/spontaneous-human-combustion-death-weird-accidents-strange-tales.htm

http://www.castleofspirits.com/shc.html

And for a good summary, see

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

For a good laugh from old TV shows

Go to www.youtube.com

You can find lots of clips of TV shows you haven't seen or thought about in decades!

I had a great time with friends finding clips of Room 222, F Troop, Hollywood Squares, Mary Tyler Moore Show (including the episode voted the number one comedy episode of all time, Chuckles Bites the Dust)... and it is just the beginning... you can expect full episodes broadcast over the net in the near future, with commercials.

Bird of Paradise Dance

If you have never seen a bird of paradise display, it is incredible... you would think it was a robot or something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEh-zclVo44

A search for El Dorado finds something far more valuable than gold

El Dorado was the fabled city of gold deep in the Amazon. It was reported once by Spanish explorers, but no trace of it was ever found...

Archaeologists looking for it recently found something beyond their wildest dreams... and a treasure far greater than gold...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2809044795781727003&q=bbc+el+dorado

Friday, June 8, 2007

Huge Comet Exploded Over Canada

About 12,900 years ago, many strange things seemed to have happened in North America, including the extinction of many mammals and the disappearance of many human cultures. The cause may have been the explosion of a comet over the Canadian ice shield.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11909-did-a-comet-wipe-out-prehistoric-americans.html

The Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan reads aloud. Magnificent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

The Greatest Salon the World has Ever Seen

http://www.edge.org

Vitamin D reduces cancer risk by 60 percent

Many people are vitamin D deficient.

The best way to get vitamin D is to go out in the sun every day for say 10 minutes.

The second best way is to take a supplement.

This needs to be done daily because the vitamin D level drops off fast.

The Canadian Cancer Society is now recommending that all adults take a vitamin D supplement daily.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070608.wvitaminD08/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

Extraterrestrial Life!

The answer to The Question of the Ages.

We are on the verge of discovering extraterrestrial life. There will be evidence or will be confirmed as early as 2008, and within 10 years at most, I think.

NASA is launching a probe to land near the north polar ice cap on Mars. The Phoenix Mission probe will dig down under the ice and hopefully retrieve samples that show signs of life.

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/phoenix_water.html

Further in the future, sample return missions from Mars will probably return live bacteria, or at least fossil evidence of such bacteria.

But the discovery could come much sooner. Our ability to detect planets around other stars is increasing very quickly, and nearly 250 planets are now known outside our solar system. Our ability to analyze the light from such planets is increasing even faster, and some scientists have said they would not be surprised to detect light reflected by chlorophyll from one of these planets. Chlorophyll is only made by living cells. If we then look at the light from the planet and see that it has a nitrogen oxygen atmosphere like the Earth does, that would be nearly conclusive.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2096474,00.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