10.7

1) Essential Jazz: "Quiet" - John Scofield



Track: After The Fact

Nylon string guitar, with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax. Great stuff.




2) Does God Play dice?



3) Quantum Astronomy: The Double Slit Experiment

"So light is both a particle and a wave. OK, kind of unexpected (like Jell-O) but perhaps not totally weird. But the double slit experiment had another trick up its sleeve. One could send one photon (or “quantum” of energy) through a single slit at a time, with a sufficiently long interval in between, and eventually a spot builds up that looks just like the one produced when a very intense (many photons) light was sent through the slit.
But then a strange thing happened. When one sends a single photon at a time (waiting between each laser pulse, for example) toward the screen when both slits are open, rather than two spots eventually building up opposite the two slit openings, what eventually builds up is the interference pattern of alternating bright and dark lines! Hmm… how can this be, if only one photon was sent through the apparatus at a time?
The answer is that each individual photon must – in order to have produced an interference pattern -- have gone through both slits! This, the simplest of quantum weirdness experiments, has been the basis of many of the unintuitive interpretations of quantum physics. We can see, perhaps, how physicists might conclude, for example, that a particle of light is not a particle until it is measured at the screen. It turns out that the particle of light is rather a wave before it is measured. But it is not a wave in the ocean-wave sense. It is not a wave of matter but rather, it turns out that it is apparently a wave of probability. That is, the elementary
particles making up the trees, people, and planets -- what we see around us -- are apparently just distributions of likelihood until they are measured (that is, measured or observed). So much for the Victorian view of solid matter!"

4) Study finds coffee reduces liver risk

"The study of nearly 10,000 people showed that those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day."

5) Bullfights? Your Club or Mine?

"You don't want to get into the arguments - it's silly," Mr. Weldon said, before wearily stating the stock rejoinders: fighting bulls live more than twice as long as beef cattle; they are pampered until fighting day; the meat is always consumed; and seeing a bull die gives one a better appreciation of what it means to eat beef.
"In the modern world the bovine destiny is the plate," said Mr. Weldon, an aficionado práctico who has killed three bulls.
"It's not fair, and it's not supposed to be fair," he said. "It's not a sport, it's an art because the bull dies."

Remember: It's not "bullfighting", folks - it's "bullkilling".





6) What Men Want: Neanderthal TV



7) GM pea causes allergic damage in mice



8) Sapling thrives from 2,000-year-old seed



9) Sprouting Keyboard (who's on top, baby?!)







10) Richard Pryor Dies 12.10.2005

10.6

1) Essential Jazz: "I Remember Miles" - Shirley Horn



Track: Blue In Green


This is now my favorite jazz piece after Wayne Shorter's "Dance Cadaverous" (Miles' "So What" at third...). Horn essentially teaches how to approach and play with changes in B.I.G., and the effect is super-mellow.

Yowsa.




2) Research: Expectations Can Help Healing

"Doctors have long thought the placebo effect was psychological. Now scientists are amassing the first direct evidence that the placebo effect actually is physical, and that expecting benefit can trigger the same neurological pathways of healing as real medication does.
'Your expectations can have profound impacts on your brain and your health,' says Columbia University neuroscientist Tor Wager."

2a) Is There a Link Between Stress and Cancer?

"...it now appears that cancer cells make proteins that actually tell the immune system to let them alone and even to help them grow."

3) Evolution, creationism both right, renowned scholar says

"His theory: Intelligent force used natural selection to make world"

You, sir, are correct!



4) Madigan says state overpaid hospital; Suit alleges U. of C. `double bunked' babies

"The treatment of newborn babies has sparked an $8 million billing dispute between the University of Chicago Hospitals and Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan, who alleges that the hospital improperly 'double bunked' infants in beds meant for only one baby.
The practice at Wyler's Children's Hospital put infants at risk for infection and led the hospitals to overcharge the state's Medicaid program from 1997 to June, Madigan said in a federal lawsuit unsealed Nov. 1.
The double bunking forced babies to share 'set-ups,' which include oxygen and other bedside supplies, and violated state rules that require infants to be 4 to 6 feet apart, Madigan contends. But the hospitals billed the state full price for those services, she alleges.
Because of their close proximity, nurses and doctors moved from one baby to the next without stopping to wash their hands," the complaint said."

(see: Ten To Go / 10.4 / 3))



5) The Universe As A Hologram

Penn Teller on God (see also Buckley, etc at the end of article)

God's Debris by Scott Adams
(eBook)

"The rain made everything sound different—the engine of my delivery van, the traffic as it rolled by on a film of fallen clouds, the occasional dull honk. I didn’t have a great job, but it wasn’t bad, either. I knew the city so well that I could lose myself in thought and still do the work, still get paid, still have plenty of time for myself.
When you’re inside your own head, the travel time between buildings evaporates. It’s as if I could vanish from one stop and reappear at the next."

That's a _very_ interesting opening hook if you're a UPS driver living the life I'm living...

“They say that they believe because pretending to believe is necessary to get the benefits of religion. They tell other people that they believe and they do believer-like things, like praying and reading holy books. But they don’t do the things that a true believer would do, the things a true believer would have to do.
“If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way, that is not belief in the truck. Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.”

Nice call. But overall flawed treatise; needs direct experience as background. :))


Adams' blog



6) Vonnegut on suicide bombers



7) This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

"...For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized.
The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.
The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top. Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information.
The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up. These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.
The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled."

8) Sapling thrives from 2,000-year-old seed



9) McDonald’s plans to switch to catfish and tilapia for its Filet-O-Fish sandwich.


10) Herring Break Wind to Communicate, Study Suggests

"The study's findings, now published online in the U.K. science journal Biology Letters, reveal that Atlantic and Pacific herring create high-frequency sounds by releasing air from their anuses.
"We know [herring] have excellent hearing but little about what they actually use it for," said research team leader Ben Wilson, a marine biologist at the Bamfield Marine Science Centre, British Columbia, Canada. "It turns out that herring make unusual farting sounds at night." Wilson and his colleagues named the phenomenon Fast Repetitive Tick, which makes for the rather mischievous acronym, FRT. But unlike the human version, these FRTs are thought to bring the fish closer together."

10.5

1) Essential Lounge: 20th Century Masters - The Best Of Dusty Springfield (Millennium Collection)


Track: The Look of Love

This woman's voice is so sultry, she gets me everytime at "The".

Bacharach's melodies are timeless.

2) Sign of the Times: "Suicide Bomber in Iraq Kills 30 at the Funeral for a Sheik Killed in a Previous (Day) Attack

3) To Fight Rising Costs, Hospitals Seek Allies in the Operating Room

"Until recently, some cardiologists at the PinnacleHealth System hospital group in Pennsylvania would inflate a new artery-opening balloon each time they inserted a stent into a patient's clogged arteries. Now, if they can, these doctors will use a single balloon throughout a patient's procedure.
That simple step, which the doctors say poses no additional risk to patients, saves at least a couple of hundred dollars a procedure.
And - here lies the controversy - the doctors share in any money they save the hospital..."

God help us.

4) No Evidence Found Linking Tamiflu to Deaths

Implications for mass innoculations...

5) Young, Assured and Playing Pharmacist to Friends

"I would never just do what the doctor told me because the person is a doctor," said Ms. Greenfield..."

6) Quantum Entanglement Explained

7) Marijuana's Active Ingredient Kills Leukemia Cells

8) Cheap Laptop Project Hopes To Help Students In Developing Nations

_Developing_ countries??! what about here?!

9) Google Aims for the Classified Ads Business

10) En Route with UPS: A Driver's Story

10.4

1) Essential Jazz - Wayne Shorter



Speak No Evil

I've been engaged in self-study of classical guitar for four years, and am now branching out into jazz theory. To improvise well, you must be able to play what you hear inside. So a lot of listening is involved in developing chops. :)
There are two cuts from Shorter's "SNE" that just blow me away; the very first word that popped into my mind on hearing "Dance Cadaverous" was "super-cool". And here's an excellent explanation why:

"Wayne Shorter's compositions helped define a new jazz style in the mid-'60s, merging some of the concentrated muscular force of hard bop with surprising intervals and often spacious melodies suspended over the beat. The result was a new kind of 'cool,' a mixture of restraint and freedom that created a striking contrast between Shorter's airy themes and his taut tenor solos and which invited creative play among the soloists and rhythm section."
- Stuart Broomer

Check out "Dance Cadaverous" and "Wild Flower" at Amazon

Blue Note page




2) Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning

Jeralyn Merritt: How the FBI Spies on You and Me

Enlisting Cellphone Signals to Fight Road Gridlock

"This enables the government to have a much easier time of knowing what private people are up to without any sort of process or consent..."

3) Study Sees Growing Dependence on Foreigners to Fill US Professions

"The United States may be neglecting the interests of the native born, particularly minorities, in its increased reliance on foreign scientific and technical talent..."

Infux of Indian Doctors

"There are now more Indian-born physicians in the US, for example, than native-born black doctors." CSM 4.19.94

Doctors Dominate Talks With Black Patients

4) Thong-wearing models + Glue-sniffing children = ? ? ?

5) VisualMath


Flash Animations For Physics

6) Ice Worms
"...thrive at 32 degrees and can live two years without food..."

7) iWorkWithFools.com

8) Exercise Amount More Important Than Intensity


Why Music Helps You exercise 20% harder




9) MC Hammer Visits Google

10) Essential Jazz - Freddie Hubbard

Hub-Tones



"Lament For Booker" at Amazon

10.3

1) Homeless Tracking System

2) A Separate Peace

Metafilter comment

"whatever. i've lived enough to have seen a lot of those older moments of doubt. and i don't disagree that it was 1776. or that the opinion piece is a set up for a bush apology. or that ennui only counts when rich white people feel it. and i work hard at being one of those valuable danes. but you'd have to be out to lunch to not be thinking how intractable it's becoming
every day. i love seeing the windmill farms. but i work in climatology research now. and every week i find out something new that scares the ever living jesus out of me. i've worked a lot more in politics for a couple of decades. and i'm finding more and more the social problems of the well intentioned are the biggest enemy. off the rails and unmanageable complexity are not to be blown off. infrastructure outstrips superstructure. only vanity keeps us going. we don't know what we're doing and we've just been hella lucky for longer than can be reasonably explained.
posted by 3.2.3 at 3:29 PM PST on October 28"

Yes. It's not just that Noonan is saying something is wrong.
But that she's saying _something very different_ is wrong...

3) Is There Another World In The Mirror, Case Physicist Asks

"Krauss concludes the book with a discussion of something even more exotic than the possibility of six or seven extra microscopically small extra dimensions. This involves the recent theoretical discovery that some or all of these dimensions could in fact be infinitely large and still remain hidden, a discovery that was made in part by one of Krauss' former doctoral students."

On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything

4) The Gospel According to Anne

"Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty."

Rice - Wiki

5) For a Retainer, Lavish Care by 'Boutique Doctors'

6) Study Ranks Homeland Security Dept. Lowest in Morale

'Only 3 percent said they were confident that in their department, personnel decisions were "based on merit." Fewer than 18 percent said they felt strongly that they were "held accountable for achieving results." And just 4 percent said they were sure that "creativity and innovation are rewarded."
Experts in human resources said the morale problems indicated in the survey should be of serious concern to the top officials at the department.

"It shows there is something fundamentally wrong at the organization," said Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.'

7) N.J. Students Ordered to Take Down Blogs

NEWARK, N.J. - "A Roman Catholic high school has ordered its students to remove personal blogs from the Internet in the name of protecting them from cyberpredators"

8) Can Marijuana Chemicals Make Good Medicine?

"Cannabinoid receptors have been found in the brain, nervous system, spleen, thymus, and in various circulating immune cells."

Pot not a major cancer risk: report

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - "Although both marijuana and tobacco smoke are packed with cancer-causing chemicals, other qualities of marijuana seem to keep it from promoting lung cancer, according to a new report.
The difference rests in the often opposing actions of the nicotine in tobacco and the active ingredient, THC, in marijuana, says Dr. Robert Melamede of the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs."

Marijuana Compound Spurs Brain Cell Growth

Denver Voters OK Marijuana Possession

9) Yahoo Local Events Browser (fact sheet)

10) Speaking of Great Album Covers...




"Sophisticated Swing"

10.2

1) Why Do We Believe In God?

"The evidence generally is that intrinsic religiosity seems to be associated with lower levels of anxiety and stress, freedom from guilt, better adjustment in society and less depression. On the other hand, extrinsic religious feelings - where religion is used as a way to belong to and prosper within a group - seem to be associated with increased tendencies to guilt,worry and anxiety."

2) The Movie in Your Head

"Is consciousness a seamless experience or a string of fleeting images, like frames of a movie? The emerging answer will determine whether the way we perceive the world is illusory"

3) Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

"Randall and Sundrum borrow some ideas from string theory but add their own twist. What if, they ask, higher dimensions are not small and curled up but large, perhaps infinite in size? Would there be any observable consequences? "

4) Miers' Answer Raises Questions

'At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, "the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause."
But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.
"That's a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause," said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. "If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable."'

Toles on Miers

Oliphant on Miers

5) Colonel Finally Saw Whites of Their Eyes

"As Colin Powell's right-hand man at the State Department, Larry Wilkerson seethed quietly during President Bush's first term. Yesterday, Colonel Wilkerson made up for lost time. He said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign policy.
He said of former defense undersecretary Douglas Feith: "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man." Addressing scholars, journalists and others at the New America Foundation, Wilkerson accused Bush of "cowboyism" and said he had viewed Condoleezza Rice as "extremely weak." Of American diplomacy, he fretted, "I'm not sure the State Department even exists anymore."

And how about Karen Hughes's efforts to boost the country's image abroad? "It's hard to sell shit," Wilkerson said.

Rice: I don't want to run for president

(Rufus T. Firefly would make a better president...)

6) Original Pussy Beer

'Somewhere between 7,000 to 4,000 B.C., in Mesopotamia, in the Kingdom of Sumeria, women invented beer. Early agriculture in the "fertile crescent" was centered around grains. Those grains, pregnant with possibility, became bread and, eventually, beer. Sumerian women were both the first brewers and the first gods of beer. By adding a trace amount of my vaginal yeast to regular brewer's yeast, my "Original Pussy Beer" pays homage to beer's ancient creators from "the cradle of civilization."


[*] 'Oktoberfest viewers sat at a long wooden table with pretzels and coasters advertising her "Original Pussy Beer: the Mother of All Beers." Sennhauser wore a St. Pauli Girl outfit and a stereo played what sounded like Bavarian beer hall music. She offered me a cup and a pretzel while a photographer hovered to catch my reaction. Sennhauser said she brewed the beer with oak chips and stuck a few up her vagina before tossing them into the mix. I sat down at the table, toasted with a few other participants, and drank.'

7) "...can I park here for a minute..."

8) Pop composer Bacharach pens first lyrics of career

"Who are these people that keep telling us lies and how did these people get control of our lives and who'll stop the violence 'cause it's out of control? Make 'em stop."

9) Shirley Horn, Jazz Singer and Pianist, Is Dead at 71

'At the time Ms. Horn was shy and largely focused on classical music, but she often cited this as the moment when it dawned on her that if she overcame her reluctance to sing and to play jazz in public, she might be able to make a living at it.
About her transition from classical to jazz, she liked to say: "I loved Rachmaninoff, but then Oscar Peterson became my Rachmaninoff. And Ahmad Jamal became my Debussy."'



shirley horn 

Here's To Life: "No complaints and no regrets
I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets
but I have learned that all you give is all you get
so give it all you got"

10) Continental Drifter: An African-American in Poland

“Polish people don’t see too many blacks,” said Mateusz, a Polish-born sculptor who spent more than a decade living in a racially-mixed neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia. “You might run into a little bit of … well, racism.”

Background story

10.1

1) Blackwater Down

(Backdoor for Israeli military in US; pg. 2/para. 2)

2) Proposal for military to take lead in disasters raises concerns

3) Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus

4) Bush Considers Military Role In Flu Fight




5) Dutch Set To Expand Euthanasia Guidelines

6) New blood-pressure guidelines pay off — for drug companies

7) Physics from Wholeness

"Physicists usually describe the world from the vantage point of its smallest component parts. But quantum theory does not allow itself to be conceptually crammed into such a framework. Instead, in her dissertation at Uppsala University in Sweden, Barbara Piechocinska takes her point of departure in the mathematics of the dynamic whole and finds that time thereby takes on new meaning"

8) Missouri May Track Cell Phones For Traffic Data

9) Ghosts of Science Past

10) Wafer-thin Color Displays