Politics

http://www.zmag.org/books/pareconv/parefinal.htm Ever heard about it? What do you think? I'm still reading the book, and I find the idea a lot interesting. I think we really need an alternative to capitalism, so I very much appreciate those who work to find a viable alternative.

If competent and guilty, Kevin Underwood deserves death.

If we look at criminal offenses like murder, assault, stealing, etc., these are treated as crimes in all cultures. These are examples of universal crimes that are independant of cultural bias. The way they are treated within various cultures, may vary from culture to culture, but in all cultures something will be done to achieve their version of justice. The other type of crimes are culturally dependant and therefore will vary from country to country. These are not universal crimes but crimes made up by people for various reasons, usually self interest. For example, in a very repressive country, reading the wrong book, can have severe consequences. One may be beaten,…

The constitution has a provision for separation of church and state. The idea was to not let religious lobbyists gain too much power and influence within Washington. That makes it easier for all the other lobbyists more concerned with worldly affairs. If we want to take this literally to separate anything that has to do with religion from the state, we need to get rid of AD and BC, with respect to how we measure historical time, since they both refer to Christ. Where should we start a nonreligious equated calendar, the BB, the formation of the earth, when life appears, when culture first appears? I am kidding around, but this is a throny technicality. Or are we supp…

A new bifocal lense prototype can change its focus automatically with a simple electric charge, leading to the hopes that bifocal users won't have to strain their eyes with the cumbersome dual-lense glasses anymore. Current bifocals combine two lenses into one piece of plastic, so that when users look down they look into a lense that lets them read and see close-up. However, this combination of lenses can cause diziness or headaches. The new prototype can change to close or far vision with the flick of a switch, and scientists are hoping to make it even fully automatic as well. http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/4/2/1

I have to write a paper on the politics of gasoline. If anyone has any links or information on these subjects please help me out Questions: [These will be in the essay] 1. Why have gas prices gone up? 2. What might happen in the next few years? 3. Where is are gas coming from? 4. What's our government policy on gasoline? 5. What is dieselfuel? -

I'm starting to wonder if the situation with Iran is becoming a matter of realpolitik -- a situation which transcends partisan bickering and standard diplomatic approaches, and requires thinking along the lines of what's realistically possible and/or likely to happen. I see a lot of people speculating about Iran, but a lot of that speculation centers around how (specifically) President Bush will handle it. That's understandable, of course, but it also strikes me as somewhat... off. For one thing, the situation is just not analogous to that of Iraq. It's more like that of 1930s Europe. An emerging power, highly motivated to solve its problems against the grain of…

I am speaking here of national level elections in the United States. Ok, is there a good reason we don't have runoff elections? I think they would be good for the system primarily because of the issue of third parties. No third party can get a foothold, as is, because when they're first established, no one votes for them, because it is essentially considered "throwing your vote away," because only Democrats and Republicans have any realistic chance. A vote for the Green Party, for example, is foolish, because if you're a Green, then you think Democrats are the lesser of two evils, and by not voting for them you're just helping the greater of two evils. (Let's see how …

I would like to propose a better way to chose a president, based on the National Spelling Bee, called the National Electron Bee. The way it would work is that the process would begin at the voting district level. Anyone who meets the criteria for running for president can run. At this first level all the competitors posture their positions and ideas, etc., and a champion is chosen among them. After this first level of competition, all the people that ran for president but did not win, become coaches to their champion. In my experience, most people have good ideas about one or two areas but not about all areas. By having all these coaches, the voting district champion will…

Yet another famous scientist has died... this time the discoverer of plutonium. http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2006/04/17/headline_news/news06.txt - Ryan Jones

China has been accused of using thousands of executed prisoner's organs for transplants and sales. While the whole "The emergence of transplant tourism has made the sale of health organs even more lucrative" part is quite disturbing, what really freaked me out is in the article... that organ box looks just like an oversized chinese food takeout box. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4921116.stm

Maybe there is a competency issue.... I'd like to see how she slipped through. Good grief.

NASA has used supercomputers to model the effect of two black holes colliding. In each simulation (the only variable was the starting positions) the black holes produced identical waveforms during the collisions. If other variables such as mass and spin could be varied then theoretically "templates" for all different waveforms could be calculated. These developments will help LIGO in its effort to detect these ripples (or waves) in spacetime as predicted by Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity. The 3D simulations used more than 2,000 of the machine's 10,000 64-bit processors, running over a period of 80 hours. BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4…

The Hubble Space Telescope has once again proven to be invaluable in discovering things about our solar system, this time its a discovery relating to the recently found tenth planet. The planet (unoficially called Xena) has a diameter about 30% greater then that of Pluto putting it at about 1,490 miles in diameter. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060417131556.htm - Ryan Jones

http://www.centralohio.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/B8/20060320/NEWS01/603200302/1002&template=B8 Doesn't this, I dunno, violate the Constitution in some way? Can one state really criminalize an activity you participated in in another state?

Yahoo story However you feel about Guantanamo Bay (and I think that this is indicative of how many people in Gitmo are being wrongly held), I think that this is an interesting story. Are they terrorists - after all, they were plotting probable terrorist action against a sovereign government, authoritarian as it may be? And two, given that they were admittedly "wrongly imprisoned" for nearly four years, and really have no place to go, should we be foisting them off on other countries (like Germany), or should we trade four years in jail for nothing for citizenship in our country?

It strikes me as per se racist to prejudge this case unless a person was there or knew the players or alleged vicitim. Although inevitable, it sickens me to see this tragedy used for political agendas and ratings. Why would anyone take a position as to guilt, unless they were members of the jury?

What do you guys think of all the criticism and calls for resignation Donald Rumsfeld has been getting recently from retired generals and the like? Should he resign?

Wasn't sure exactly where this belonged, so i figured that news reporters integrity probably belongs in politics. I read this blog entry on 'video news releases' (vnrs)... it's on a computer security blog, so it focuses on computer companies such as trend micro and intel, but if you follow the link to the centre for media and democracy you can see lots of companies using this technique. Basically, a company will make a news-reportesqu advert, and then send it to a news company such as fox, who will skin it up with their logo and stuff and then introduce it on their news program as 'a report on x by our reporter bobby mcbobson'. The advert then insidiously snea…

What do you think of the Seymour Hersch report? My guess is that the administration "leaked" the nuclear contingency plans to pressure the international community and Iran. I do not see us stepping up to the plate by ourselves to become an international pariah. Suppose the administration had ironclad intelligence - to the extent ironclad intelligence ever exists these days - that Iran will acquire the bomb and a delivery mechanism within the next six months? What is the appropriate response if any conventional attack would be ineffective?

From the The Weekly Standard

Physicists have not found the first ever gas that does not reach equilibrium! The trick is the gas is 1D. The team describe the gas as acting line a quantum Newton's cradle. http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/4/7/1 - Ryan Jones

PBS Frontline has produced another gem. "The Tank Man" is a 90-minute episode about the man who stood before the line of tanks near Tiananmen Square in June of 1989. His identity is still unknown, but the episode does not only a stellar recap of those events, but also delves into the modern perspective on the story, talking about how dramatically China has changed since those events and what those events mean to China today (including the current dialog and accusations about companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco aiding the Chinese government in not only censoring the media, but in capturing and detaining dissidents). In one of the more interesting moment…

According to this article, unborn babys can feel pain. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4875196.stm Does this change anyone's attitude about abortion?

A recent study suggests that the UK's testing system for bird flu may actually be missing most cases, leading officials to believe the flu isn't as widespread as it really is. New Scientist has talked with several bird flu experts, and they say that the numbers produced by the UK's tests are vastly different than expected. "There's something wrong with those numbers" says one Swedish expert, and others suggest that the techniques for obtaining fecal samples from birds are flawed. If they're right, it means that the UK may have a much larger problem than it thinks. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025473.600