| Tuesday, September
12, 2006
From Joanne Dow: Subject: Newly released private
footage of 9/11
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/09/11/video-911-as-it-happened/
It's the bottom clip on the page. It is ABSOLUTE
dynamite.
{O.O}
Fair warning: these are the real thing.
=============== I found all these in my mail today:
============
TB emergency declared in Africa
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/4182990.stm
Published: 2005/08/25 23:57:01 GMT
African health ministers have announced a
regional tuberculosis emergency due to a sharp rise in the number of
cases.
The declaration was made in Mozambique at a
meeting of the World Health Organization's (WHO) African region.
WHO Regional Director for Africa Dr Luis
Gomes Sambo appealed for "urgent and extraordinary" action to prevent
the situation from getting worse.
Tuberculosis, or TB, kills half a million
people a year in Africa, a quarter of the global total.<snip>
==
'Virtually untreatable' TB found
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/health/5317624.stm Wednesday, 6
September 2006, 07:56 GMT 08:56 UK
Transmission electron micrograph of TB
(Science Photo Library/K Kim) A "virtually untreatable" form of TB has
emerged, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Extreme drug resistant TB (XDR TB) has been
seen worldwide, including in the US, Eastern Europe and Africa, although
Western Europe has had no cases.
Dr Paul Nunn, from the WHO, said a failure
to correctly implement treatment strategies was to blame.
TB experts have convened in Johannesburg,
South Africa, to discuss how to address the problem.
TB presently causes about 1.7 million
deaths a year worldwide, but researchers are worried about the emergence
of strains that are resistant to drugs.<snip>
============
Four out of five migrants 'take more from
economy than they put back'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/
news.html?in_article_id=402607&in_page_id=1770
&in_page_id=1770&expand=true#StartComments
By JAMES SLACK Last updated at 00:01am on
29th August 2006
Comments Reader comments (6)
Migrants aren't putting back into the
economy what they are taking out. Click enlarge to see the full, table
of migrants' earnings
Four out of five migrants take more from
the British economy than they contribute, a report has warned today.
The analysis demolishes the Government's
key claim that migrants pay more in taxes than they take back in public
services.
Instead, a small number of very high
earning foreign workers are masking the fact that 80 per cent of
immigrants are taking more out of the economy than they contribute over
their lifetimes.
Only one in five is earning the £27,000 a
year required to make a positive contribution over the course of their
lifetime. It means that, if they settle here, they will cost the
taxpayer money.<snip>
That, of course, is Britain; but surely the economics are about the same
here?
==
Phillip J. Hubbell: My home became a ghetto
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/
opinion/points/stories/DN-hubbell_03edi.ART.State.Edition1.3e597bc.html
As immigrants moved in, our peaceful
neighborhood declined
03:05 PM CDT on Sunday, September 3, 2006
I'm a Fort Worth native and lifelong Texan
who's spent the last 21 years living and working in North Texas. But
now, I'm living in Omaha, Neb.
I love my home state and never would have
moved if my company hadn't transferred me. I could have delayed the move
until 2009, but I decided to get out of Carrollton sooner, before my
property value plummeted even further. That, plus I was getting tired of
having to make an effort to be understood in English in my own town.
The two are connected.
The property values in my south Carrollton
neighborhood had been steadily rising for years. My wife and I bought
our home in 1988 when she became pregnant with our second child. It was
a nice, quiet neighborhood on a dead-end street. Lots of little homes
whose owners took responsibility for the upkeep, mowed their lawns and
who had pride in the look of the place.
I don't care about skin color, ethnicity,
religion, creed or anything other than the content of someone's
character. These are external attributes and have no bearing on whether
someone is a good neighbor or a good person. Ours was a mixed
neighborhood, with whites, African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Middle
Easterners and even some gay folks.
At some point things changed. The trigger
was 9/11. A lot of people lost their jobs as a result of the economic
downturn caused by that event - myself included. The economic
demographic of the neighborhood changed, and so did the general makeup
of our part of town, which includes southern Carrollton and northern
Farmers Branch. Along with a lot of the houses becoming rental
properties, the number of Hispanics whom I believe to be illegal aliens
skyrocketed.
For some reason Farmers Branch and southern
Carrollton seem a favorite stopping off point for these lawbreakers. Our
government declines to do anything about people breaking these laws, and
people who complain are branded as racist. Of course being called a
racist these days on the immigration issue doesn't really mean much. It
just means that you disagree with blame-America-first liberals on the
left and open-borders, cheap-labor businesspeople on the right.<snip>
================
http://health.msn.com/healthnews/ArticlePage.aspx?cp-documentid=100144052
Cognitive reserve
By Harvard Health Publications
People with more years of education, more
intellectually demanding occupations, or higher IQs are less likely to
develop Alzheimer's disease. A meta-analysis of 20 studies including
more than 30,000 subjects, indicates a fairly close and consistent
correlation over an average of seven years. It looks as though some
brains have a backup capacity, now called cognitive reserve, that can
delay or prevent the onset of dementia. What's unclear is the source of
this reserve capacity and its practical significance.
A simple explanation for cognitive reserve
is that by virtue of heredity, environment, or both, people with higher
education and higher IQs can tolerate more loss because they have larger
brains - more neurons, or more synaptic connections among neurons. A
larger head size (which usually implies a larger brain size) is
associated with a lower risk of dementia. In the Minnesota Nun Study,
for example, autopsies revealed that Catholic sisters with a head size
greater than average were less likely to develop symptoms of dementia
with the same amount of apparently Alzheimer's-induced brain damage (amyloid
plaques and neurofibrillary tangles).
But it may be the software - active reserve
- rather than the hardware that provides protection. Brains with the
same number of neurons and synapses may differ in efficiency, especially
as they age. And just as new blood vessels sometimes grow around blocked
arteries, some people may make better use of existing circuits or
recruit alternative circuits to compensate for losses and prevent
disruption of mental activity.<snip>
=============
Synthetic biology: Life 2.0
http://www.economist.com/business/
PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=7854314
[Related material appended.]
Aug 31st 2006 | BERKELEY, CAMBRIDGE,
MASSACHUSETTS, AND ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND
The new science of synthetic biology is poised
between hype and hope. But its time will soon come
IN 1965 few people outside Silicon Valley had
heard of Gordon Moore. For that matter, no one at all had heard of
Silicon Valley. The name did not exist and the orchards of Santa Clara
county still brought forth apples, not Macintoshes. But Mr Moore could
already discern the outlines. For 1965 was the year when he published
the paper that gave birth to his famous "law" that the power of
computers, as measured by the number of transistors that could be fitted
on a silicon chip, would double every 18 months or so.
Four decades later, equally few people have heard
of Rob Carlson. Dr Carlson is a researcher at the University of
Washington, and some graphs of the growing efficiency of DNA synthesis
that he drew a few years ago look suspiciously like the biological
equivalent of Moore's law. By the end of the decade their practical
upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be the power to synthesise a
string of DNA the size of a human genome in a day.
At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering
is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to
species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as
drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as
insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. But
the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows the name, but that may not stop
it from sticking) is making that possible.
In the short run such engineering means assembling
genes from different organisms to create new metabolic pathways or even
new organisms. In the long run it might involve re-writing the genetic
code altogether, to create things that are beyond the range of existing
biology. These are enterprises far more worthy of the name of genetic
engineering than today's tinkering. But since that name is taken, the
field's pioneers have had to come up with a new one. They have dubbed
their fledgling discipline "synthetic biology".
Truly intelligent design
One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is
Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, came to the subject from engineering, not biology. As an
engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he sees one. And life, in his
opinion, is a kludge.
No intelligent designer would have put the genomes
of living organisms together in the way that evolution has. Some parts
overlap, meaning that they cannot change jobs independently of one
another. Others have lost their function but have not been removed, so
they simply clutter things up. And there is no sense of organisation or
hierarchy. That is because, unlike an engineer, evolution cannot go back
to the drawing board, it can merely play with what already exists.
Biologists, who seek merely to understand how life works, accept this.
Engineers such as Dr Endy, who wish to change the way it works, do not.
They want to start again.<snip>
=================== The Situation Report
This is an update of what I posted last Saturday before I knew what was
going on. Pardon the repitition.
First, we now know from extensive xrays and CT scans that my problem is
not a sinus infection at all, nor is it cancer. I have a form of arthritis
in my neck and this sends signals that my brain interprets as pains in my
head. I had deduced this from experiments: lying flat on the floor
would usually get rid of the "sinus" pain, which didn't seem reasonable if
the source were some kind of infection. And as I said last Saturday, "I sit in a most
improbable position, head braced hard against the back of a high-back office
chair (my expensive and comfortable chair having been temporarily exiled),
arm straight out, eyes looking at a level. It's not comfortable, but it does
stop the headaches. If my head is held just right it doesn't hurt to sit
here. At least not a lot, and when it does it's fixable by adjusting my
position.
"That tells me that my problems have to be structural, pinched nerves,
unstretched muscles, blocked blood flow, something of the sort, which is
probably adjustable. I can't think that a sinus infection would be relieved
by sitting in a particular position. I still get flashes of a sinus headache
alternating with the hideous migraine-like whammy in the back of my head,
but if I hold my head just right -- which means bracing against the back of
the chair in just the right position -- I can get some work done without
doping myself to the point of being unable to think. And since it is
structural, I expect there's a treatment. Chiropractors, perhaps.
Orthopedists. Physical therapy. Surely there's a way out of this, and I
intend to find it. "
Today (Tuesday 12 September) I went to Physical Therapy where I was
fitted with a collar. It makes me look like a very old fashioned priest, or
perhaps a victim of whiplash. I wore it driving from the physicians to
various places where I had errands. I took it off to go inside shopping for
various items including salads for our Hollywood Bowl outing tonight. I'd
put it back on driving from one place to another, and I am wearing it now.
The result of all this is that it's 3:30 PM and I haven't had to take any
pain killers, although I don't know how much longer that will go on. Sitting
here writing this gives me some pains, but as long as I hold my head up they
aren't too bad. It's looking down at the keyboard that really causes
problems. I need to adjust to that.
For those who don't know: several months ago I developed what felt like
sinus headaches. They combined with an old migraine that I used to get when
I was younger but which I hadn't experienced for years. The two then
alternated in periods of minutes to hours, sometimes in phase so I got both,
and they got progressively worse until it became very difficult to work. I
have since had XRAYS, dental Xrays, CT SCAN, blood tests, and other medical
witchcraft. The experts have been over all these, and they find nothing
except for arthritis. We're now looking for treatments, both pills and
physical.
All this made me mildly late I have been late on columns, but I am caught
up now, and I expect to stay caught up. My apologies for missing a week. I won't miss a
month. Writing with a collar on and sitting in a ridiculous position to write is a small price to pay for
being on time monthly for 27 years.
To repeat Saturday's exposition:
The old paper BYTE column was 5,000 words. Sometimes they wanted longer,
as for example when they sold a lot of advertisements and needed editorial
content to hold the ad pages apart, so it might go up to 7,500 words. When
we went over to On-Line I wrote the column monthly, and it generally came
out to about 12,000 words, sometime creeping up to 14 or 15 thousand. The
editors chopped it into segments and doled it out weekly. This went on for a
while until someone made the mistake of chopping it into 4 segments when
there were 5 Mondays in the month. I saw they had fired themselves dry and
rushed in 2500 words to cover. This happened a couple of times. I still did
the columns monthly but sometimes with a weekly supplement. It was
interesting being able to comment on things that had just happened. IN the
paper BYTE days, I would prepare the April column and get it in before 7
January; it would be on the stands in mid-March. That meant having to write
things that would still be interesting when they came out.
I have been doing the Chaos
Manor Reviews columns weekly. For a while that was easy enough, and left
plenty of time for fiction; after all, I am primarily a science fact and
fiction writer who found a great gig as a computer columnist to bring in a
steady income. Now that it doesn't insure a steady income (more on that in a
moment) fiction has to come first; still, it was no problem at all, until
the headaches hit me. Why they happened I don't know. Is this a message?
Memento mori? Bones getting soft? But it sure did remind me; after all, we
lost Charlie Sheffield just as we were about to do another Higher Education
book (my turn to write most of it; he did most of the work on the first
one), and Bob Forward, both to brain cancer, and both without much warning.
That doesn't seem to be the case here, but it sure scared me.
Anyway: I will continue to do the columns, and I will continue to try to
post a new one ever Monday; but the guarantee will have to be about 8,000
words a month. More if I can do them. Plus the mail bag. I contend that
Chaos Manor Mail
(part of this web site) is one of, if not the, best mail columns on the web;
and I contend that the mail bag at
http://www.ChaosManorReviews is as good as any computer-related mail
feature you will find on line or in print.
I also do this page, which is arguably the first blog; certainly I was
doing an on line public daybook long before anyone else I know of. I didn't
-- and don't -- organize in "blog format" with the latest on top, because I
find that hard to make sense of. I don't call this a blog -- I find the name
ugly. This is a daybook, or journal, and while the subject is often
political I don't think of it as a political journal. I have had my
successes in politics, having successfully managed campaigns for Congress
and Mayor of Los Angeles and having been an advisor to a President and a
Speaker as well as to several Members of Congress. I still have a have a few
political contacts, but I don't often use them. Politics has left me a bit
behind: I am frightened of both parties and the continuing trend to make
everything a federal case, leaving nothing to the states and to the people,
and I don't find either party very sound on those matters. I do not believe
in "big government conservatism" and I find the term self-contradictory. I
don't believe in "compassionate conservatism" in any political sense. One
ought to be compassionate, but to the extent that this should be a
government activity it ought to be local; and for the most part it ought not
be governmental at all. The major benefit of charity is to the giver. There
may be necessities -- for a man to love his country, his country ought to be
lovely, and it is not lovely when one lives in a land of beggars -- but in
many cases the welfare bureaucracy is self perpetuating. And I see I am
rambling: my point is that I try to be more philosophical than political.
Political victories can affect principles, and have done so; but if one has
a nation with strong enough principles, then it ought not matter much which
party prevails, except that no party ought to govern for too long. If you
wish to call this page political, it is hard to disagree, yet I do disagree
in that it is not just political: I am concerned about principles which
endure long after elections are forgotten.
I suppose, though, that this page is a result of my having been offered a
position teaching a senior seminar on technology and civilization to a
technical university, only to have that withdrawn because of my work in
"Star Wars." I don't apologize for being one of the founders of a strategy
of Assured Survival -- that was the title of a chapter in Possony and
Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology, 1970 -- nor will I ever; but that did
cost me the professorship, so this page is my compensation, so to speak.
Strategy of Technology in pdf format:
And enough rambling.
All of this is, of course, a pitch to get you to subscribe. I do thank
all those who have subscribed, particularly those who showed great
confidence by sending in new subscriptions or renewals in the past couple of
weeks while things were erratic.
The simplest way to subscribe is through paypal:
That button makes it painless to send in a patron subscription. There
are other methods, all described here.
I do both the computer columns and this page in part because it's usually
enjoyable, but they do have to make enough money to justify their
continuance. And I am doing more fiction, and now that I know how to sit to
write fiction I'll be doing more.
It's sure an odd position to sit in, but it does seem to be working. And
now I have to go work on the column. In part this ramble has come about
because it is taking more than two hours to download the newest VISTA. More
on Vista in the column.
=======
End repetition and pitch for subscribers.
In upcoming columns you will see: Vista vs. Linux. I am setting up two
computers of about equal capability, one using Linux, the other Vista. I'll
alternate work with each, and we'll see what happens. And in a couple of
months I'll try the whole experiment on an Intel Mac, with Mac, Linux, and
Vista all running on the same machine. That ought to be fun...
And I'm turning out fiction. I ain't licked yet.
============
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