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News Briefs 11-11-2010

Swim… until you can’t see land.

  • Incredible new image of a distant galaxy seen from side-on —like taking a peek in God’s letterbox.
  • Alan Boyle borrows my flux capacitor to look at what’s ahead for medicine, climate science & cosmology —I showed him my crystal ball & he frowned.
  • Shake, rattle & roll —in your grave: More ghosts reports after New Zealand earthquake.
  • Robot explores ancient tunnel at Teotihuacan —a 1st for Mexican archeology 🙂 [VIDEO in Spanish]
  • Stone Age farmers domesticated cereals not out of hunger, but out of thirst —for beer. A nice trivia to tell the wifie when going for a refill.
  • Get paid to pee in South Africa. You’re in?
  • Is Robert Zoellick (President of the World Bank) advocating for a return to the gold standard? I’ll stick with the South Africans’ model, thankyouverymuch.
  • Direct conversion of human fibroblasts to multilineage blood progenitors —that means making blood out of skin, for us non-members of MENSA.
  • For Afghan women, the only liberators from their oppresion are fuel & matches.
  • India’s naked chimp looks all too human —maybe we’re all just chimps with mange.
  • Biggest stick insect colony in the UK discovered in a garden in Cornwall —maybe there’s a labyrinth buried there?
  • Holy Menu! New self-cloning lizard found in Vietnam restaurant.
  • The world’s best underwater photographs 2010 —Pandora ain’t got nuthin’ on u, momma!
  • Asian farmer claims to have been abducted and seduced by a 10-foot-tall alien woman —no doubt a Na’vi springbreaker.
  • 5 Reasons women are as shallow as men, according to Science —no wonder you’re still not getting any, you nerds!

Thanks to Kat, Rick, & the Pleiadians.

Quote of the Day:

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the players, (ie everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

Neil Gaiman (who has taken 50 laps aboard this wild merry-go-round)

  1. Zoellick

    Is Robert Zoellick (President of the World Bank) advocating for a return to the gold standard? I’ll stick with the South Africans’ model, thankyouverymuch.

    I’ll stick with DeLong and Krugman. With my bold emphasis:

    November 8, 2010, 9:13 am
    Barbarous Relic Watch

    So Robert Zoellick wants us to return to return to a modified gold standard. Brad DeLong pronounces him the stupidest man alive; that’s much too kind.

    Click the link, to find out why.

  2. Light ’em up if you got ’em
    Re: For Afghan women, the only liberators from their oppresion are fuel & matches.

    This was a disturbing article just on the surface of it. The story is really quite unnerving once you take a moment to consider it in depth… and for me, that moment happened at dinner last evening.

    Our household is majority female, ranging in age from 87 to 22 and divided between three distinct generations. Concepts of the woman’s place in society do therefore reflect the same, with the eldest a lot skeptical of female politicians and the youngest being a firebrand (no pun intended) of energy and vision.

    We generally do not spend a lot of time reading at the table because… well, most of us are too busy eating. But on this occasion, I printed out the above story and passed it around to see what reaction I could stir.

    The 87 year old; my Mother, thought it was horrible but had a tough time grasping just how bad it is in some parts of the world. Remember that in her time, news was more thoroughly controlled than it is today, being limited mostly to newsreels and then, the nightly news with Walter Cronkite.

    But my better half (age: top secret) and our daughter (age 22)… as well as our daughter in law (age 23), all agreed that these women should just dump the gasoline/fuel over their lord-husbands/male family members and… hell, light them on fire and see how they like it!

    That went on for a spell.

    My mother was aghast at such a notion, though. One just does not burn one’s spouse or even the in-laws. Burning one’s self is bad enough… but to light up another? Especially the old man?

    It was a curious conversation and one that has not totally yet ended. I expect that tonight’s meal might even revisit the subject.

    NOTE: I am a little concerned though that the real core of this story was being somehow neglected by initial emotions to the concept. It became a conversation of what we might do ourselves rather than what we could do to help alleviate the suffering.

    **Thanks to all those who update the listings with these articles. TDG is an annual sawbuck well spent 🙂

    1. Self-immolation dinner conversation
      Very interesting post, Redoubt. Thanks.

      This may stir more thoughts around the dinner table — it’s the original unedited version of the article at The New York Times:

      For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out

      This link isn’t intended to blame RPJ for not finding the original. We news editors can’t possibly read every word of every article we contemplate posting, and the posted Oz version didn’t mention NYTimes as the original publisher until the very end of the article, didn’t include a link to the original, and, as is the case with all newspapers, didn’t advise readers that they’d edited the story.

      **Thanks to all those who update the listings with these articles. TDG is an annual sawbuck well spent 🙂

      You’ve no idea how much such acknowledgments mean to us. Posting TDG’s news is a labor of love – for the subject and for TDG’s loyal readers — all 15,000-a-day of you!

    1. poor sea turtle
      Awww, now why’d you have to go and remind me. Now I’m all misty-eyed and depressed again. *sniff*

      But I was so glad see that there are still a few fish left out there.

      1. Tunnel
        I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

        The archeologists think they’ll finally find the tombs of Teotihuacan rulers. It could be much more interesting, though, if they don’t find that sort of thing.

        Once I read a book that speculated on the possibility that the Teotihuacan pyramids generated energy. the potential difference could even be measured with a voltmeter. So maybe those “tunnels” that were deliberately covered were part of the machinery plumbing 😉

        In any case, it is a monumental achievement for Mexican archeology. The robot that was designed & built by a Mexican engineer cost less than 2,000 dollars!

        You don’t know how great is to read something about Mexico that is uplifting, for a change.

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