Re: constatine's 'cross' may have been mushroom cloud from meteorimpact
Here is a picture of a cross in the sky: http://science.nasa.gov/spaceweather/nlcs/images2003/04jul03/McEwan2.jpg This is from a gallery of noctilucent cloud images presented by the http://www.spaceweather.com/ Web site. -- Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Br1n Comes In Second
From http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2003-07/14/10.00.books or http://makeashorterlink.com/?X38D21645 Excerpt: The John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year, meanwhile, went for the first time went to a previous Sturgeon Award winner: Nancy Kress, for her novel Probability Space. Kress' husband, the late Charles Sheffield, had won the Campbell Award a decade earlier, the first husband and wife to be so honored. Second place in the Campbell Awards went to David Brin's Kiln People; third place went to Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids. Reggie Bautista _ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Political Compass
Deborah Harrell wrote: Couple of years ago at a party, some guy actually asked me my sign...I managed not to laugh, but only just, and womanfully refrained from snapping Off Limits! ;-) Astrology is so abhorrent to me, that the first time that I thought of Natalia's sign was when she was about 1.5 years old. Someone asked her sign, and I had to think about it: she was born on the same date as me, so I knew her sign. I once challenged a professional astrologer to compute my sign based on my personality: I would answer truthfully any questionaire [that did not require giving bank account passwords, of course] and he had to reconstruct my birthdate based on it. He bailed out evil grin WFC Maru Alberto Monteiro ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
[L3] RE: SCOUTED: Are Americans part of an UnregulatedExperiment?_USA Today
Here's one I apparently meant to send some time ago- --- Chad Cooper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: massive snippage This article shows that good reaserch is needed more than arbetrary bans on chemicals and technology. Environmental pollution, pesticides, and the prevention of cancer: misconceptions [published erratum appears in FASEB J 1997 Dec;11(14):1330] BN Ames and LS Gold Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, 94720, USA. [EMAIL PROTECTED] The major causes of cancer are: 1) smoking, which accounts for about a third of U.S. cancer and 90% of lung cancer; 2) dietary imbalances: lack of sufficient amounts of dietary fruits and vegetables. The quarter of the population eating the fewest fruits and vegetables has double the cancer rate for most types of cancer than the quarter eating the most; 3) chronic infections, mostly in developing countries; and 4) hormonal factors, influenced primarily by lifestyle. I'll add that viruses (like human papilloma virus) contribute as well, althopugh maybe they were putting them in the chronic infection category. There is no cancer epidemic except for cancer of the lung due to smoking. Cancer mortality rates have declined by 16% since 1950 (excluding lung cancer). I'm not sure where they got those figures; CDC data tables comparing cancer deaths per 100,000 population in various decades beginning with 1950 actually show a slight increase: all ages/all persons 1950 = 193.9 deaths per 100K; 1998 = 202.4. At ages 55-64 there is a 'breakover' with younger people having less mortality now than in 1950, and older people having increased mortality (but the population is also proportionately older) now. However, female cancer mortality is down overall (I suspect that is due to improved detection/treatment of breast and cervical cancers), while male cancer mortality is up (especially black male, but black female is up too). http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2002/02hus039.pdf Certainly lung cancer deaths have increased since 1950, especially in the over-65 set: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2002/02hus040.pdf Five-year cancer survival rates have improved more in men than women, although lung rates have been fairly stable, with a slight gain in survival for white males, and loss for black females. (Annoyingly, breast was not listed in this table.) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2002/02hus057.pdf [OK, I had to check: while white females have seen a mild decline in breast cancer mortality, black females have had an increase in it -- health care access issues? So much for my theory about the decline in overall female cancer mortality; maybe women eat more fruits and veggies, especially the older ones??] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2002/02hus041.pdf Regulatory policy that focuses on traces of synthetic chemicals is based on misconceptions about animal cancer tests. Recent research indicates that rodent carcinogens are not rare. Half of all chemicals tested in standard high-dose animal cancer tests, whether occurring naturally or produced synthetically, are carcinogens; there are high- dose effects in rodent cancer tests that are not relevant to low-dose human exposures and which contribute to the high proportion of chemicals that test positive...Plants in the human diet contain thousands of natural pesticides produced by plants to protect themselves from insects and other predators: 63 have been tested and 35 are rodent carcinogens...The focus of regulatory policy is on synthetic chemicals, although 99.9% of the chemicals humans ingest are natural. Wild animals, including humans, evolved along with these plants; susceptible individuals are likely to have died or had fewer offspring. An example of an artificial chemical which our bodies apparently do not handle well is trans-fatty acids, which come from artificial hydrogenation of oils (promotes heart disease; there was a recent ruling that foods are going to have to be labeled with the grams of trans-fats/serving -- some snack foods companies have already removed hydrogenated products from their chips etc.). There is no convincing evidence that synthetic chemical pollutants are important as a cause of human cancer. But there is plenty of evidence that specific chemicals cause various conditions, including cancer, especially with occupational exposure: arsenic = skin and lung cancer benzene = various leukemias lymphomas polychlorinated biphenyls = reproductive damage, liver damage, chloracne (chronic skin rash/breakdown), and probably skin cancer This 1998 study finds exposure to certain herbicides and fungicides increases risk for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has been increasing in Western societies: http://www.poptel.org.uk/panap/archives/nhl.htm ...In this study, exposure to both herbicides and fungicides resulted in significantly increased risks for NHL. Among herbicides, the phenoxyacetic
Re: [L3] RE: SCOUTED: Are Americans part of an UnregulatedExperiment?_USA Today
--- Deborah Harrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here's one I apparently meant to send some time ago- Very thurough. Thank you for sharing all that work. = _ Jan William Coffey _ __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: parallel universes
Still wading through my to read files... --- The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC588 Short version: somewhere or when or how, invisible pink (euww!) unicorns DO exist...(IIRC, Dan M. said something to this effect last year, although I think in jest - mostly) Long version: ...One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything that is possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Beyond the range of our telescopes are other regions of space that are identical to ours. Those regions are a type of parallel universe. Scientists can even calculate how distant these universes are, on average. And that is fairly solid physics. When cosmologists consider theories that are less well established, they conclude that other universes can have entirely different properties and laws of physics. The presence of those universes would explain various strange aspects of our own. It could even answer fundamental questions about the nature of time and the comprehensibility of the physical world... ...QUANTUM MECHANICS predicts a vast number of parallel universes by broadening the concept of elsewhere. These universes are located elsewhere, not in ordinary space but in an abstract realm of all possible states. Every conceivable way that the world could be (within the scope of quantum mechanics) corresponds to a different universe. The parallel universes make their presence felt in laboratory experiments, such as wave interference and quantum computation... ...Like some of those alternatives, the cyclic model is based on the idea that our universe is a three-dimensional brane that bounds a four-dimensional space. Another brane--a parallel universe--resides a subsubatomic distance away. That universe is closer to you than your own skin, yet you can never see or touch it. These two branes act as if connected by a spring, which pulls the branes together when they are far apart and pushes them apart when they are close. Thus, they oscillate to and fro. Periodically the branes hit and rebound like cymbals. To those of us stuck inside one of the branes, the collision looks exactly like a big bang. The hot primordial soup was the energy dumped into the branes when they hit. The density fluctuations that seeded galaxies began as wrinkles in the branes... [Vision of neurones of the brain's neocortex, which is wrinkled into sulci and gyri, as galaxies...] ...Everett's many-worlds interpretation has been boggling minds inside and outside physics for more than four decades. But the theory becomes easier to grasp when one distinguishes between two ways of viewing a physical theory: the outside view of a physicist studying its mathematical equations, like a bird surveying a landscape from high above it, and the inside view of an observer living in the world described by the equations, like a frog living in the landscape surveyed by the bird. From the bird perspective, the Level III multiverse is simple. There is only one wave function. It evolves smoothly and deterministically over time without any kind of splitting or parallelism. The abstract quantum world described by this evolving wave function contains within it a vast number of parallel classical story lines, continuously splitting and merging, as well as a number of quantum phenomena that lack a classical description. From their frog perspective, observers perceive only a tiny fraction of this full reality. They can view their own Level I universe, but a process called decoherence--which mimics wave function collapse while preserving unitarity--prevents them from seeing Level III parallel copies of themselves... ...So should you believe in parallel universes? The principal arguments against them are that they are wasteful and that they are weird. The first argument is that multiverse theories are vulnerable to Occam's razor because they postulate the existence of other worlds that we can never observe. Why should nature be so wasteful and indulge in such opulence as an infinity of different worlds? Yet this argument can be turned around to argue for a multiverse. What precisely would nature be wasting? Certainly not space, mass or atoms--the uncontroversial Level I multiverse already contains an infinite amount of all three, so who cares if nature wastes some more? The real issue here is the apparent reduction in simplicity. A skeptic worries about all the information necessary to specify all those unseen worlds... ...In this sense, the higher-level multiverses are simpler. Going from our universe to the Level I multiverse eliminates the need to specify initial conditions, upgrading to Level II eliminates the need to specify physical constants, and the Level IV multiverse eliminates the need to specify anything at all. The
Toys (was: Reading lists)
--- Julia Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip And the cousins I saw the most often growing up were actually second cousins, and they didn't have very many toys at all that I remember (but the youngest was at least 3 years older than I was), but they were really good at finding stuff outside to play with, and the oldest once made a swing for my sister and myself, out of a board and a length of rope, and tied it to a tree limb, and that was *really* cool. So, as far as my cousins went, the ones with the least stuff (especially the least Barbie stuff) seemed to have the most fun. (But they had more dogs than any of the rest of my cousins, and a better place for riding bikes, and a beach very close to their house, where they could get into wet seaweed fights) A teacher friend and I have discussed how it seems that many children today have to be entertained instead of making up their own toys/stories/games, and how scheduled/regimented their days seem in comparison to ours-of-then. Marbles, colored pencils, pebbles from the beach all 'stood in' for whatever we needed for the game-of-the-day: jungle animals, soldiers, spaceships. Tree-shadow meant forest, direct sunlight was prairie, fences were mountains or rivers (except when one had *real* forest with boulders and creeks to play in!)... Maybe it was more a case of making do with what we had, because certainly having a genuine leather bullwhip that your grandfather had shown you how to crack! made playing Round-Up or Tarzan much more fun. :D Debbi who never had 'Barbie envy,' but did covet a richer friend's model horse 'herd'... ;) __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: parallel universes
In a message dated 7/15/2003 4:01:23 PM US Mountain Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Unitary Fluctuations Of Decoherence Ergodicity Maru (I thought I'd just toss together some terms from this article :} - what a lovely word-salad!) You need to top that salad off with a Thousand This Island Earth Dressing. Ergodisity: of or relating to a process in which every sequence or sizable sample is equally insulted, representative of the whole. As in: Yo mamma in every parallel universe is so ugly.. William Taylor - Teaching arctic birds to poop on a poet is definitely a tern for the verse. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
The Periodic Table of Dessert
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/periodic/closeup.html xponent Yumms Maru rob ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
The Pictorial Periodic Table
http://chemlab.pc.maricopa.edu/periodic/spiraltable.html New ways to add sense to the periodic table via layout. xponent By Design Maru rob ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
The Boob Timeline
http://www.dribbleglass.com/boobs/index.htm *Approved By Men Everywhere xponent Mostly Safe Maru rob ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
