Under the Radar: March 2009

Saturday, March 28, 2009

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dismissed with the contempt reserved for that which we do not understand.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Visual References in the Finale to Battlestar Galactica

From the Earth to the Moon, Finale

Star Trek, the last movie of The Original Series

Stands-with-Fist in Dances-with-Wolves

Plaque on Pioneer Spacecraft

Out of Africa

Bladerunner

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I'm not a smart man... but I know what love is...

http://www.videosift.com/video/Im-Not-a-Smart-Man-But-I-Know-What-Love-Is

Cantarell is continuing to crash

The second largest oilfield ever discovered is collapsing at 40% per year...

Get 10 minutes of sun per day or eat sardines or take vitamin D pills

Low blood levels of vitamin D may be associated with an increased risk for dementia, a British study has found.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/health/research/24aging.html

My guess at the order of the implosions

I guess the UK is going to implode next.

Followed by EU banks.

Followed by the US banks and everyone else.

Conservatism works in a world that is not changing

... in a world that is changing as fast as this one, it will simply be left behind...

Aw, darn it, Cheeta is NOT still alive...

...it is a kind of tall-tale hoax. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101260910

Slogan for the Reagan-Thatcher years

Me, myself, and mine...

which is blowing up now...

Thank you very much....

The cause of the worldwide financial implosion

Not only did the quants (see below) give the illusion of precision and actual estimates of risk, the ratings agencies pretended that a lot of things were AAA... if they were so inclined...

Diabetes can slow the brain

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_73396.html

Silent runs on banks and insurance companies

A silent $1 trillion "Run on Britain" by foreign investors was revealed yesterday in the latest statistical releases from the Bank of England. The external liabilities of banks operating in the UK – that is monies held in the UK on behalf of foreign investors – fell by $1 trillion (£700bn) between the spring and the end of 2008, representing a huge loss of funds and of confidence in the City of London.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/run-on-uk-sees-foreign-investors-pull-1-trillion-out-of-the-city-1639413.html

Monday, March 9, 2009

The real test of a story

Or a good movie...

... is you feel transformed and will never be the same again...

Dances-with-Wolves ([He who] Dances with Wolves)

Apollo 13

Ghandi

2001

A story on NPR, on This American Life...

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Photovoltaic panels to drop by about half by the end of the year

The prices of photovoltaic panels is crashing due to the depression, so the end of 2009 to 2010 may see good prices... but don't wait too long... a lot of manufacturers are going out of business, so this fire sale won't last forever.

The depression has brought oil exploration and development to a screeching halt, so there is going to be a nasty energy crisis when the economy finally picks up in two years... or five... or...

If your fan doesn't blow air like it used to

If you notice that somehow your fan seems to be blowing less and less air, or that your exhaust fan does not seem to be doing its job, try cleaning the blades.

The tiniest amount of dust on the blades can really disrupt the airflow (think a little bit of ice on the wings of a plane causing a huge loss of lift). Clean the grill too. Try feeling the airflow before and after cleaning. You will be amazed.

The answer to The Question of the Ages

Kepler to be launched in hours. If it makes it and works for three years, we will know which of 100,000 Sunlike stars has Earthlike planets. Actually, information will probably start leaking out later this year.

A current guess is that nearly every Sunlike star has at least one planet or moon that could support life. Our solar system alone used to have at least three. Venus and Mars had oceans like Earth billions of years ago. Even now, it is likely there are at least bacteria all over Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and possibly the upper atmosphere of Venus and in the subsurface of the larger asteroids. And that is just for life as we know it...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/keplerf-20090305.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html

Everything blowing up so fast

Could hardly keep up with the news.

Message to Mesa: How do you know you are in trouble?
Answer: Your stock is listed in hundredths of a cent.

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