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News Briefs 18-08-2006

By Katon

After winning 168 games in a row, chess grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca said, ‘I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one.’ That would be a big improvement for me.

  • Scribbles in Rosslyn’s stonework may prove (okay, may be evidence) that ancient Celts circumnavigated the globe. Somebody ring Crichton. Update: Several comments have now been posted beneath this article. #8 is a detailed comment by Crichton E M Miller, author of The Golden Thread of Time. (Amazon UK)
  • Now widely acknowledged as having solved the Poincaré conjecture, Grigory ‘Grisha’ Perelman will probably be awarded the Fields medal next week, but many believe the brilliant mathematician may spurn the greatest accolade his peers can bestow. Why? Well, he turned down a prestigious European award, supposedly saying those who awarded it weren’t qualified to evaluate his work, and he hasn’t bothered to claim the Clay Institute’s million-dollar award either, even though it would likely be his for the asking.
  • Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: the Poincaré conjecture explained simply enough that you can at least understand what all the fuss is about.
  • The Expert Mind: Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.
  • Irish tech firm throws down ‘free energy’ gauntlet: Dublin-based Steorn has placed an advert in The Economist seeking 12 top physicists to examine their technology – based on the interaction of magnetic fields – and publish their results.
  • The influence of Vedic philosophy on Tesla’s understanding of free energy.
  • Australia was formed 1.6 billion years ago by the collision of three continents.
  • The 2 percent gene difference between humans and chimps represents at least 15 million changes in our genome since the time of our common ancestor roughly 6 million years ago. One of those changes gave us bigger brains.
  • Your brain boots up like a computer. Mine must still be using Windows 95. It’s good to know an upgrade may eventually be possible.
  • Hubble captures images of the faintest stars in the galaxy – the burnt-out relics of ancient celestial objects that formed many billions of years ago. Read it now, save it, or pay-per-view later.
  • Compared with the technology used in earlier efforts, SETI’s new instrument is like the difference between a Lexus and an oxcart, but what happens if a signal is found?
  • The Key to Atlantis: The Magic Mushroom. And to think, Jake wrote this without ever having visited TDG. No telling what what he’ll come up with now that I’ve invited him to drop by.
  • Microbe being studied in Scotland threatens to overturn current thinking about the production of greenhouse gases.
  • Has Vic Tandy proved that ghosts are created by low frequency sounds?
  • Several airline passengers snap photos of UFOs following their plane to Moscow.
  • Late psychic Dorothy Allison’s 1998 sketch of JonBenet’s murderer bears a striking resemblance to recently-arrested Karr. Investigators were led to Karr by emails he wrote containing details about the murder that were never made public. Why have so many people believed the Ramsey’s killed their daughter?
  • An interview with Bill Katovsky, author of Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out. Amazon US & UK.
  • 9/11 Live – The NORAD Tapes: How did the US Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD’s Northeast headquarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day – and the Pentagon’s apparent attempt to cover it up.

Thanks to Alex at Pravda, and to Greg. How ’bout that – somebody at Pravda reads TDG. Cool.

Quote of the Day:

You’re talking about morality. We don’t do morality in the CIA.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer, in Telluride for a talk about oil and war in Iraq. Almost forgot… Baer is the author of See no Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, the book the movie Syriana was based on. Amazon US & UK.

Kat
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12 Comments

  1. “may prove”
    RE: ‘stonework may prove ancient Celts circumnavigated the globe’

    how is it possible for something to ‘possibly prove’ something?

    surely this is the same as saying that it doesnt prove something?

    regards
    The Matrix

      1. there is…..Kat,
        absolutly nothing wrong with what you wrote. It’s a sign post…….to read on to see if it does…..whether it prooves it or not has nothing to do with the headline. It’s like saying to your kids,”if you stand too close to the sprinkler, you’ll could get wet”. Well maybe thats not a good example but you might get my drift.

    2. “may be evidence”
      Okay, Matrix, I had a cup of coffee, and then fixxored the headline about Rosslyn.

      What can I say… I was excited about how this theory ties in with Crichton Miller’s Celtic Cross work, and intended the original headline to read the way Floppy took it.

      Kat

  2. NORAD tapes
    Seems to me that one major problem highlighted concerned NORAD staff not knowing if events were real or simulated. Guess they should learn from the old story about ‘crying wolf’ once too often.

    Nostra

  3. Phenomenal news day, Kat!!
    Your news selections today generate an overall aura of optimism I haven’t felt in a long while – the Irish firm and their free energy findings; Jake Kotze and his mushroom key to Atlantis– innovative thinking like that is always welcome; the Poincaré conjecture explained so I can understand it (now to find someone to discuss it with); Tesla; how to develop an ‘expert mind’, etc. – all my favorite subjects. Thank you very much!!!

    1. Phenomenal news day
      >>Your news selections today generate an overall aura of optimism I haven’t felt in a long while… all my favorite subjects. Thank you very much!!!

      Unfortunately, I’ve complained and harangued so much recently about the general lack of feedback from readers, that simply saying, ‘Thanks, you have no idea how much I appreciate your comment,’ just doesn’t seem adequate. If I hadn’t been eating copious amounts of Zoloft during my past two weeks off, I’d probably still be saying something over-the-top like, ‘Oh my God – I can’t believe someone actually noticed!’ But now that the Zoloft’s working, I just want to explain…

      A lot has to be taken into consideration when putting together a News Brief for TDG. You have to read at least part of each article you find, to decide if TDG’s readers would enjoy it. Many times that decision rests more on whether the article is well-written than on its actual content because, while I might read far enough to find out that an article takes a spectacularly interesting turn in paragraph 5, I know most TDG readers won’t get past those first 4 boring paragraphs. Here are a couple of examples of how I go about deciding which articles to post…

      Although Expert Mind is reasonably well-written from the start, it was that last (7th) paragraph on the first page, explaining how chess players are rated, that really hooked me. But since my interests aren’t what’s important here, I then asked myself questions like, how many TDG readers are interested in chess – or psychology – or brain science? Will they want to know why it takes longer to become an expert hunter than it does to become a brain surgeon, or that the measurement of chess skill has been taken further than measurement of skill in any other game, sport or competitive activity?

      Why didn’t I post some of SciAm’s other featured articles? Fish and the Forest just seemed a bit boring. Here’s the gist, so you can let me know whether or not you agree:

      ‘Our findings surprised us: bears actually fertilize the forests, nourishing them by discarding partially eaten salmon carcasses. Not intentionally, of course, but the end result is that these large predators bring valuable marine-derived nutrients, in the form of salmon tissue, to the streamside woodlands, where the uneaten fish provide sustenance for an array of animals and plants. The flow of nutrients from ocean to streams to woodlands is an unexpected, even unprecedented, uphill direction for resources to travel.’

      Was I right? Is it boring?

      Another July feature that didn’t make my cut, for several reasons, was A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy. First off, I may be able to shorten or rewrite a title for TDG, but I figured that when most TDG readers clicked and read SciAm’s full title…

      A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy: Cryogenic, superconducting conduits could be connected into a ‘SuperGrid’ that would simultaneously deliver electrical power and hydrogen fuel

      …they’d be so overwhelmed by all this technical jargon, they’d hit their ‘Back’ buttons so fast, their computers would freeze up.

      But I still didn’t give up on this article immediately. I thought to myself, if I can figure out how to get them past this ‘title problem’, is the subject itself interesting, and is this particular article written well enough to convey that to most readers? The article IS interesting allright – and extremely relevant to the quality of life the vast majority of TDG readers can expect to enjoy in the future. But I don’t think most people would read even the first page unless I was able to do the impossible, i.e. completely rewrite the first page, like this, to give you the gist:

      Electrical blackouts: Remember 2003, when that cascading power failure knocked out electricity to 8 million in NYC and 40 million others in the northeastern US and Ontario? Remember the European blackout a month later that affected 56 million in Italy and Switzerland? (Or the recent 10-day-long blackout in Queens, which happened after this article was published?)

      These blackouts are due to a pervasive problem in our vital but aging electrical grids. Electrical grids are society’s equivalent of a biological circulatory system, so, following that analogy, on a societal level, these blackouts have a lot in common with heart attacks.

      Despite the importance of these electrical grids, in both the US and Europe, no single organization has control over (or responsibility for) their proper operation, maintenance and protection. Dozens of utilities must cooperate even as they compete to generate and deliver, every second, exactly as much power as customers demand – and no more.

      Why are these large blackouts occuring more frequently? Our aging power grids have a fundamental limitation which makes them poorly suited to handle society’s relentless increase in demand for electrical energy. Utility companies cannot simply pump more power through existing high-voltage lines by ramping up the voltages and currents. At about one million volts, the electric fields tear insulation off the wires, causing arcs and short circuits. Higher currents heat the lines, which then sag dangerously close to trees and structures, causing fires. And since utility companies must continuously match electrical generation to consumption, it’s easy to see why these aging grids can’t easily accomodate the unpredictable and intermittent power they would recieve from renewable sources such as wind farms and solar panels.

      The rest of this 6-page feature is about the engineers who’ve been working on a solution which could be implemented piecemeal to help shore up the existing grids as it eventually replaces them completely. Of course it’s technically complicated. Of course it would be expensive. But if you happen to have lived in the northeastern US or Ontario during 2003, and especially, if you live in Queens or California right now, you’re probably jumping up and down, screaming, ‘we can’t afford not to do something!’, and you’re probably very keen to read the rest of the article. But take a look at the original, and then tell me, was I right to think most TDG readers wouldn’t want to read it?

      Just one more example… Why did I post two articles about ‘Grisha’ Perelman possibly winning the Fields medal next week? The Guardian article did a great job of explaining who Perelman is, and why everyone in the math world thinks he won’t bother to accept the Fields, but it explained very little about the math problem he solved, or why it’s important. The nytimes article did the latter about as well as it could be done, considering that even most mathematicians didn’t understand Perelman’s solution when he first posted it to the web, but I thought it was a bit heavy on the players and the math to post it by itself. Btw, I also read most of 6 other articles about Perelman (out of about 28 that were posted on the web at the time) before deciding which to include in today’s news.

      Greg, Rico and I have to make these kinds of decisions hundreds of times during each search we do for TDG news.* Yes, having been a TDG fan myself for the past 5 years or so, I’m pretty familiar with most of the subjects typically covered here. But I’m still just one reader. Which is why I’ve been asking for feedback lately. Your feedback makes it a lot easier for us news editors to make thousands of these decisions each week on your behalf – easier for us to post news that you’ll find most relevant and interesting.

      So… Thanks, Anon! Comments like yours really float my boat, make my day, and – most important – let me know I’m not wasting both my time and yours.

      Kat

      Addendum: Sorry, just gotta add this… Especially in light of recent revealations about hoaxed UFO videos, why did I post the Pravda UFO article? The twist got me. The UFOs were invisible to the naked eye. The woman who first photographed them just thought she was taking a picture of the sky. She was so shocked at seeing the UFOs in her photo, she showed everyone else on the plane, and they started taking pictures of ‘just the sky’ with their cell phones, and the UFOs showed up in their photos too. I also liked the angle that the spread of a new technology allowed multiple people to document the phenomenon at the same time.

      Why was today’s quote from the CIA guy? Actually, I thought the reporter’s coverage of the talk was hilarious, and just wanted an excuse to post a link to it. I also found the movie Syriana so interesting, I wanted to post a link to Baer’s book.

      *I suspect Jameske only posts what he finds interesting, and doesn’t give a fig whether you lot like it or not. hehe

      1. Poor Jameske
        Kat — Your analysis of what interests TDGers is always ‘spot on’ – our faulty logic in not mentioning how much we appreciate your diligence, keen insight, and overall concern for and efforts to improving the world situation is that we fear it would become redundant mentioning it every Friday. You are correct in your assessment of the fish and electrical grid stories – your rewrite of the latter tells me you’re either a retired teacher or journalist. I know it’s presumptuous to speak for others, but please know how much we appreciate all of you at TDG – even Jameske (who has endeared himself to me with his frequent Tesla posts). Lose the Zoloft, but never lose faith in what you’re doing or our faith will crumble right behind yours.

      2. My interest in Tesla
        Why do I carry on so about Tesla you ask? When I learned about his amazing scientific contributions some 15 years AFTER I finished my formal education, I had to wonder why the sanctioned school books didn’t mention this man. To this day, most schools still teach that Marconi invented the radio. In actuality, Marconi was able to get his own patent in 1904 using some of the ideas Tesla had already patented between 1898 and 1903. The Supreme Court case of Tesla v. Marconi in 1943 invalidated the fundamental Marconi patent because it was anticipated by Tesla.

        Does anyone know if school children today are taught this or anything about Tesla?

  4. ghosts are created by low frequency sounds
    Seems to me the conclusion was very Schermer like.

    The only thing this shows is a possible, if not probable, relationship between ‘ghosts’ and infrasound.

    It has not proven that the low frequencies actually ‘created’ the ghost but that its application could be associated with it.

    Likewise, claiming that low frequencies lead to hallucinations seems like a not very scientific minded assumption.

    The assumption simply being that if you see something that I don’t see then it is not there, therefore you are hallucinating.

    This systematic denial is what has prevented us from exploring other areas of our reality. Denial is based on assumption and negative belief.

    Why not consider the possibility that the association that can be made between infrasounds and apparitions it other than illusory? Why consider that there is only one possible conclusion, the very one that the writer seems to have been keen on demonstrating?

    Very typical, very Schermer like, very unscientific.

    1. What I find interesting is
      What I find interesting is that he assumes ALL ghost sightings are seen through the human eye. He doesn’t explain the ghost sightings found on mechanical devices such as camcorders and cameras.

      Such as when “hallucinations in the periphery of their visual field” is seen, a camcorder picks up exactly what was seen, is the camcorder hallucinating also? What about when multiple people are present seeing and feeling the same thing? Does this ultra sound affect multiple people at once causing everyone present to see the same exact thing? What if 3 people are present and see the same thing, camcorder picks up that sighting also, is that a hallucination? If the ultrasound creates the ghost sightings as he claims, wouldn’t that just prove that the ultrasound attracts the ghost sightings? How does he prove ultra sounds creates hallucination when he didn’t consider other variables such as mechanical devices and multiple people present recording/seeing the ghost sighting?

      I’m a skeptic. I like the TAPS show Ghost Hunters on sci-fi because their goal is to disprove a haunting, so they say. Lots of times they disprove the so called haunting. Other times they have recorded things like chairs moving by themselves, shadows flying from wall to wall, and partial apparitions. Many times 2 people are present, sometimes 3 people, with a camcorder. Other times its just the camcorder recording. They show the evidence to the owner of the haunted house 2 days later. Not much time to edit the videos. You can claim that every ghost sighting recorded on film is edited and faked but then you have to accept the possibility that the moon landing was edited and faked also. I’m a skeptic but I’m also a skeptic of skeptics with an agenda.

      I read TDG for awhile now – maybe 3 years. I didn’t want to post but I felt the claim was ridiculous and had to post. The scientist left open many variables and came to a conclusion using constricted research.

      Anyway, I agree this is quite unscientific.

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