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Two new reports shed light on some of the latest thinking on a charged question: whether the unborn feel pain.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on April 14, 2006, 6:06am

Two distant “supermassive” black holes are believed to be spiraling into each other, and to a violent union.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on April 14, 2006, 6:04am

Teeth as old as 9,000 years betray prehistoric trips to the dentist, anthropologists say.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on April 14, 2006, 6:01am

Researchers also say there’s growing evidence of parallels between ring formation and planet formation.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on April 5, 2006, 11:57am

Researchers report for the first time successfully rebuilding complex organs using lab-cultivated tissue.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on April 5, 2006, 11:58am

This from Blogburst:

BlogBurst is a syndication service that places your blog on top-tier online destinations. You get visibility, audience reach and traffic, while publishers weave the rich and diverse fabric of the blogosphere into their sites.

Some big name bloggers are already signed up like Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion and so are big name newspapers like the Washington Post and chains like Gannett

Here is a more complete story at Wired, which says in part:

Newspapers are looking to BlogBurst to provide expert blog commentary on travel, women’s issues, technology, food, entertainment and local stories, areas where publishers may not have dedicated staff, said Pluck’s chief executive, Dave Panos.

In return, a select group of popular bloggers are offered wider distribution for their writings, he said. The online syndicate drives traffic to blog sites, allowing featured bloggers to make money from resulting online advertising fees.

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:37pm

“If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report you probably remember the impressing gesture based computer interface that Tom Cruise uses there. … Minority Cube allows you to control the rotation of a cube on the screen by simply moving your hand in front of your webcam.”

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:35pm

how to interpret the world around us

The work of Trevor Paglen is tactical media, speculative non-fiction - an “experimental geography” - as he calls it, accompanied, of course by “experimental lectures”. The online component of his work has a travel-logue quality, with interventions and alien inspired expeditions validated by documented, journalistic interviews. Paglen is a cross-disciplinary practitioner and tactitioner in writing, installation, photography, lectures, performances, interventions, and exhibitions. He appropriates technologies and practices and originates the necessary techniques. One such, “limit-telephotography”, was developed for The Secret Bases project to examine the non-space of secret bases and their supposed non-existence.

In projects like Carceral Landscape the Prison Infiltration and Surveillance Suit was performance attire developed to enable covert videography for the project. Documentation is shown from these visits. Pagen co-opts the stealth technlogies to spy back on the spies and uncover the covert, which he weaves together in speculative, but plausible narratives to help us interpret the world around us.

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:34pm

ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and Hearst-Argyle are appealing an FCC ruling last month that found several shows indecent because of their language. “We are seeking to overturn the FCC decisions that the broadcast of fleeting, isolated — and in some cases unintentional — words rendered these programs indecent,” read a rare joint statement from the networks. “Furthermore, the FCC rulings underscore the inherent problem in growing government control over what viewers should and shouldn’t see on television.” The statement also pointed out that parents now have V-chips to control what their kids watch on TV.

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:29pm

machinima about the oct ‘05 revolts in france. made using the game “The Movies” (thanks rob)

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:48pm

User generated content can generate cash, but typically not a lot of cash.

Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Amazon Affiliate Program, Feedburner, Commission Junction, and a host of other services are happy to pay you for the right to put ads or links on your pages.

But the amount of money that results is usually not enough to quit your day job.

I give my blogging revenues away to charity. It makes me feel good. But even that has its issues. If the money is sent to me directly, I get a 1099 and generally have to pay taxes on the money I am giving away. I can take a deduction for that money, but there are limitations on the deductions and I get hosed by the IRS for doing something good.

This morning, as I was blogging and doing email, I was listening to Radio Paradise, a listener supported internet radio station. I was hit with the urge to direct all the money I make on Yahoo! Publisher Network for the next month to Radio Paradise. It was too hard, so I didn’t do it.  I sent them cash via paypal instead.

What I want is a place I can send all the money I am getting from these various services to.  I don’t want to pay taxes on that money unless I ultimately take it down personally. I want to be able to send that money anywhere I want, to my blog host provider, to my podcast host provider, to charity, to Radio Paradise, or anywhere else that I feel like it should go.

It would be great if PayPal or someone else could build this. I’d use it

UPDATE: On my bike ride this morning, I thought some more about this and figured out that PayPal was already halfway there to creating this virtual bank account I want. Feedburner currently pays via PayPal. If Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, CJ, and other third party networks would support a PayPal payment option, I’d basically have what I need except for the tax implications which would remain a nuisance.

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:26pm

This is happening much faster than I expected. Buckel up it’s going to be a wild ride!

Originally posted by thudlike from del.icio.us/tag/future, ReBlogged by agmilmoe on Apr 15, 2006 at 12:48 PM

Originally from unmediated on April 16, 2006, 8:28pm

We’re not sure how to categorize that one. “Weird Science Project Gone Too Far”, maybe? Or “Alternative Energy” and “Food”, to be literal about it. From the website: “I built a potato battery out of 500 pounds of potatoes. It powered a small sound system. With the help of the Red 76 crew I installed the battery and sound system in the back of a U-Haul truck and drove it around town inviting people to enter the truck and take a listen.” And a final warning, “Don’t eat potatoes after using them for a battery.” We’ll remember that… ::500 lb Potato Battery, via ::Digg.

(This post continues on the site)

Originally by mike from Treehugger on April 17, 2006, 8:50am

People go vegan for health or ethical reasons, but here is another good one- saving the planet from greenhouse gases. Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, (pictured here) Assistant Professors in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, studied the production of greenhouse gases for different diets and found that a strictly vegetarian diet to be the most energy efficient, saving a ton and a half of CO2 or equivalents per year. Chicken came next, while red meat and, surprisingly, fish, tied for last. “Fish can be from one extreme to the other,” Martin said. Sardines and anchovies flourish near coastal areas and can be harvested with minimal energy expenditure. But swordfish and other large predatory species required energy-intensive long-distance voyages. Half of the greenhouse gas used generated comes from transport; the balance is from sources like sewage lagoons associated with pork production. We suppose that a new category of diet is needed: the 100 mile vegan. ::Eurekalert

UPDATE: MGR reminds us of an earlier article in ::Alternet

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on April 17, 2006, 7:59am

Originally from Smartspace on April 18, 2006, 10:50am

Originally from Smartspace on April 8, 2006, 1:18am

Originally from Smartspace on April 8, 2006, 1:18am

[This image is from an exhibit
Seeing Elsewhere
that investigates "the intricate role [that] visual culture plays within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exploring the way images shape historical memory and influence our perception of events.” Explosion was taken by Shirley Wegner in 2003.]

Originally from Subtopia on April 17, 2006, 2:13am

[Image: February 1, 1948 – The Palestine Post Car Bombing. Photo – Central Zionist Archives Photo Archives.]

While scores of American soldiers, Iraqi security forces, and Shiite neighborhoods are permanently stalked by ‘the road to martyrdom’ of an insidious traffic war that haunts them in the streets of Iraq, via anonymous vehicles everyday (where roughly 1,300 car bombs have exploded in the last couple of years), the 80 year evolution of this ‘poor man’s air force’, as Mike Davis calls it, has reached a new apex today as the global insurgents’ weapon of choice.

[Image: "'My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: A History of the Car Bomb' in the 1975-1991 Lebanese Wars" by The Atlas Group.]

The car bomb is now legitimately “comparable to airpower in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities,” he says, not to mention its effect “at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base of support,” which is very similar to the way aerial bombardment campaigns have always functioned as a psychological weapon, demoralizing the enemy by having things hurled down at them from the sky.

[Image: "'My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: A History of the Car Bomb' in the 1975-1991 Lebanese Wars" by The Atlas Group.]

Thanks to the short history Davis so incisively documents in this two-part series for Mother Jones, the car bomb is both the perfect literal and symbolic tool of a counter-empire military landscape; he points out that they’re extraordinarily cheap, stealthy, easy to organize, “inherently indiscriminate”, and leaves little forensic trace of culpability. Ultimately, he writes, “The car bomb is an inherently fascist weapon.”
What I find interesting, though, is that the car — a long time symbol of American brand freedom, and today perhaps the crude object of an American dependence on foreign oil — has become the harbinger of this violent message, and made it, as Charles Krauthammer has stated, “the nuclear weapon of guerrilla warfare.”
The tale of how America’s modern freedom horse became a new symbol for a global insurgency againt them, began with a horse-pulled cart packed with dynamite and iron slugs exploded outside the J.P.Morgan office headquarters in 1920. The vehicular weapon burst onto the scene as a device that was not only meant to kill, but also to get at the inner sanctums of capitalism in order to sabotage its financial ordering of the political structure. Since then, the car bomb has underwritten the geopolitical climate of terrorism around the world in what has now come to represent the ultimate “blowback” to American militarism.

[Image: A Kashmiri peers into the windshield of an exploded vehicle after a car bomb went off in Srinegar.]

Davis traces the windy-road lineage of the car bomb from its use by the Jews, Christians, Hindus, the Tamil Tigers, assorted anarchists, French colonizers in Algiers, the mafia, the IRA, the British in their attempts to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon, and last but not least, the CIA, who, during the 80’s trained the mujahedin and gave them “malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities. […] It was the greatest technology transfer of terrorist technique in history” says Davis. “There was no need for angry Islamists to take car-bomb extension courses from Hezbollah when they could matriculate in a CIA-supported urban-sabotage graduate program in Pakistan’s frontier provinces.”

[Image: BATF summary table illustrating the size and range of effectiveness of car bombs by vehicle type. - Wikipedia.]

Davis cites Steve Coll from his book Ghost Wars who writes, “the vast training infrastructure” that the Americans helped to build “with the enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 — the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on — would be referred to routinely in America as ‘terrorist infrastructure.’” And so, as seemingly with much of the legacy of U.S. military conquest, the Americans have essentially put into place the very pieces of the puzzle that have led to the asymmetric nature of today’s conflict againt them which Davis describes as uniquely characteristic of the millennium.

[Image: Photo essay on Bagdhad Explosions outide the "Green Zone".]

Now, with car bomb attacks rising dramatically around the world (which are virtually impossible to defend against) not only does the urban space of these target zones become a vastly different playing field (where the Americans are found retreating into the medieval enclaves of the “green zone” guarded by huge blast walls and layers of concrete barrier), but the urban space of the West’s own cities now, too, become surreptitiously vulnerable. City planners don their military strategist uniforms to figure how to turn their precious gems of modern civilization into proto-militant urban fortresses which are, ironically enough, already infiltrated by the world’s most sophisticated road networks that seem to just be lying around in wait for the delivery of eventual car bomb attacks.

[Image: Photo essay on Bagdhad Explosions outide the "Green Zone".]

In a forthcoming article entitled ‘Cities and the ‘War on Terror’, professor Stephen Graham indicts the production of a military urbanism as a “securitized ‘inside’ enclosing the urban places of the U.S. Empire’s ‘homeland,’ and an urbanizing ‘outside,’ where U.S. military power can preemptively attack places deemed sources of terrorist threat.” He argues that the Bush doctrine of the ‘War on Terror’ has constructed a “binary portrayal” of separate places, distant cities, “imaginative geographies” between the West and the untamed Arab world, (or, the sort of urban spatial equivalents of ‘Us vs. Them’) that are militarily treated together as a single “’integrated battlespace’ prone to rapid movements of ‘terrorist’ threats into the geographical and urban heartlands of U.S. power at any instant.”; a projected battlespace that re-images ‘Homeland Cities’ as a network of ‘National Security Spaces.’

[Image: Z Backscatter Image Reveals Car Bomb]

Davis goes onto to discuss how police snipers in London have been rapidly replaced by a omnipotent watch over the streets with thousands of CCTV cameras, making the UK’s capital the most surveilled space perhaps in the world. While this type of surveillance may help to identify and apprehend non-suicidal suspects, it doesn’t do jack against car bombers. Fearnig Bagdhad may serve as a metaphor for our collective urban future, he concludes his article in part with this rather painfully obvious statement: “until some miracle technology emerges (and none is in sight) that allows authorities from a distance to “sniff” a molecule or two of explosive in a stream of rush-hour traffic, the car bombers will continue to commute to work.”

Anyway, Davis’ article is a precursor for a larger book he’s writing on the subject, and will also appear in another book due out next year, Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, edited by Michael Sorkin. So, keep your eyes peeled.

Originally from Subtopia on April 15, 2006, 7:27pm

We Will Destroy You is a video installation by Chris Evans. Participants play a normal game of space invaders, but hidden inside the arcade cabinet is a video camera, filming their reactions and facial expressions. The video is then projected on the wall of a bar, where customers get the evil destroying stares looking right at them.

Originally by chris from Pixelsumo on April 15, 2006, 11:12am