Opportunity starts scaling Solander Point – her 1st mountain climbing goal
See the tilted terrain and rover tracks in this look-back mosaic view from Solander Point peering across the vast expanse of huge Endeavour Crater. Opportunity will ascend the mountain looking for clues indicative of a Martian habitable environment. This navcam camera mosaic was assembled from raw images taken on Sol 3431 (Sept.18, 2013). Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com). See the complete panoramic view below
NASA’s intrepid Opportunity rover has begun an exciting new phase in her epic journey – the ascent of Solander Point, the first mountain she will ever climb, after roving the Red Planet for nearly a decade. See the rovers tilted look-back view in our Sol 3431 mosaic above.
Furthermore, ground breaking discoveries providing new clues in search of the chemical ingredients required to sustain life are sure to follow as the rover investigates intriguing stratographic deposits distributed amongst Solander’s hills layers.
Why ? Because NASA’s powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) circling overhead has also recently succeeded in collecting “really interesting” new high resolution survey scans of Solander Point! Read my prior pre-survey account – here.
So says Ray Arvidson, the mission’s deputy principal scientific investigator, in an exclusive Opportunity news update to Universe Today. The new MRO data are crucial for targeting the rover’s driving in coming months. (...) Read the rest of Opportunity Scaling Solander Mountain Searching for Science and Sun (1,386 words)
President Obama gets 140 Twitter characters just like the rest of us, but a recent poll shows that half of GOP voters really aren’t sure that’s true.
This latest Obama conspiracy came about a few days ago when former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted Twitter management demanding to know why the president gets more than 140 characters.
Fleischer pointed to a tweet from Obama’s handle promoting his Clinton Global Initiative appearance, which he said ran 140+ characters. He wrote:
“Question to @gov: how come @BarackObama ‘s last tweet was more than 140 characters? Does he play by different rules???”
It actually came in at about 136, as pointed out by just about everyone.
Fleischer later apologized for his errant tweet explaining that when he went to retweet, the message included @BarackObama which tilted the number of characters up above 140. But the damage was apparently already done.
The left-leaning Public Policy Polling organized a poll of likely Republican primary voters whether they thought President Obama really gets more characters on Twitter.
We’re not sure if it’s a testament to the power of suggestion or what, but 13 percent of likely GOP voters responded that Obama absolutely gets more than 140 characters per tweet. A thankful 36 percent said no, but a whopping 52 percent weren’t really sure.
#Obama gets more than 140 characters for Tweet Up responses, its good to be the President of America!
It's been nearly ten years since Texas convict Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the 1991 murder of his three young daughters and four since journalist David Grann pointed—rather convincingly—to his innocence in a massive investigative piece for The New Yorker. Today, fueled by new evidence, Willingham's family members have joined forces with exoneree Michael Morton and the Evidence Project to renew calls for his posthumous pardon.
Willingham maintained his innocence throughout his adult life, notably refusing to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, and used his last words to ask that his name be cleared. But by the time an Austin fire investigator, among others, concluded that the evidence of arson was based on "junk science," it was too late; Governor Rick Perry ignored Willingham's appeals, and he was executed in 2004. The New Yorker piece arrived in 2009, shortly after yet another expert concluded that Willingham was likely innocent.
Today, in addition to new evidence of Willingham's innocence, the Innocence Project is alleging corruption in the trial, the Texas Tribune reports:
Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, said the organization has uncovered new evidence that the prosecutor who tried Willingham paid favors to the jailhouse informant whose testimony—along with arson science that has since been debunked—was a key factor in the young father's conviction.
In a powerful letter to Governor Rick Perry, Willingham's family, along with Scheck, points out that a major witness in the trial has since recanted his testimony, saying he was "made to lie." Under a 2009 law, this would have provided Willingham a right to relief:
Johnny Webb, a jailhouse informant who had been sentenced to 15 years for aggravated Robbery, testified that Willingham confessed to murdering his children in an effort to cover up child abuse by his wife Stacey. But years before Willingham’s execution, Johnny Webb acknowledged in a handwritten motion that he lied about the confession.
Plus, as the undersigned detail in an accompanying "Petition for Posthumous Pardon," the science supposedly confirming Willingham's guilt has since been disproven. The New York Times summarized the evolving understanding of arson evidence in 2012, when the family first pushed for a pardon (though Grann's piece offers a far more detailed look):
The original report noted burn patterns on the floor and cracks in the window as clear evidence that Mr. Willingham had spread accelerants. But no such chemicals were found in the house, and today fire scientists say that such patterns are evidence not of arson but simply of very hot fires.
On one level, a pardon would be comfortingly symbolic—it would clear Willingham's name, fulfill his dying wish, and provide his family with some semblance of closure. And even if he weren't innocent (which he probably was), he's dead. It's not like Texas would be letting a murderer walk free.
But more practically, it could do much to overturn or prevent false convictions in similar arson cases in Texas or nationwide. As the Times reported in 2010, such a reversal could do much to debunk Antonin Scalia's claim in a 2006 ruling that there is not "a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit."
That's more than symbolic, a fact perhaps no one understands better than Michael Morton, the exoneree joining the call for Willingham's pardon.
In a 1999 episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpsons accidentally created the tomacco - a tomato and tobacco hybrid.
That frankenplant was recreated in real life in 2003 by Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon). In that case, the real life tomacco was created when Baur grafted a tomato plant onto tobacco roots - the plant actually lived and even bore tomatoes, which Baur suspected to contain lethal dose of nicotine.
Well, fast forward to 2013 and here comes another tomato-based combo plant: the Tomtato, a plant that is both tomato and potato.
Michael Perry, new product manager at UK's mail order seed and plant company Thompson & Morgan, told NBC News, "It's the perfect marriage. Why wouldn't someone want to buy one?"
Photo: Thompson & Morgan
The Tomtato bears cherry tomatoes above ground and white potatoes below. According to the Thompson & Morgan website, horticulturists have tried to create a creation for 15 years but the plants have only recently been successfully produced commercially. When they're just a few weeks old, tomato plants are cut at the stem and grafted onto a potato plant. Scientifically, that works because tomatoes (as well as tobacco plants) are members of the potato family (Solanaceae).
I spent my early evening getting my home ready for the onslaught....and by day break the rain will have overspread the region.
The new 4-km WRF model run is the same story as before : heavy rain from two major pulses on Saturday and Sunday. Here is the 72 hr precipitation totals over the Northwest. Much of the terrain will get 5-10 inches, some of the higher peaks more.
Let's zoom in over western Washington. What a contrast! More then 10 inches over the higher Olympics, while about a half inch over Sequim. A factor of 20...amazing. In Sequim on Saturday there will only some light rain. Over Puget Sound there will be a strong north-south gradient in precipitation...a lot more in Tacoma than Everett.
Now, there is a another threat that must be mentioned. A small but intense low center will form on Sunday over the Pacific and will move northeastward, crossing somewhere between the Olympics and central Vancouver Island. Here are two solutions for Sunday at 8 PM. The UW NAM-MM5 has the low over Tatoosh, Big threat of strong winds over Puget Sound.
While the WRF-GFS takes it a bit far northwest. Both bring strong pressure gradients and strong winds to the coast, which you can expect 40-60 mph gusts.
The WRF surface winds for this time, show sustained winds of 35 kts (40 mph) along the coast and over the interior waters of NW Washington. Gusts would be considerably higher.
Enjoy the weather show. Not a good day for a hike.
Note: this post contains many, many spoilers for Breaking Bad. Update (2 October 2013) below.
In a Reddit AMA session a few months ago, Bryan Cranston was asked when he thought his character on Breaking Bad broke bad. His response: “My feeling is that Walt broke bad in the very first episode. It was very subtle but he did because that’s when he decided to become someone that he’s not in order to gain financially. He made the Faustian deal at that point and everything else was a slippery slope.”
The story of Faust, the man who made a deal with the Devil, dates back many centuries and has taken many forms, from folktales to puppet shows to plays to novels. Since Johann Wolfgang von Goethe completed Part I of his play Faust in 1808, variations on the tragedy have inspired at least a dozen operas, as well as numerous art songs and concert works.
The tale’s lengthy heritage suggests that there’s always been something intriguing about watching a man freely sacrifice his soul for a chance at happiness. I’ll focus on works derived from Goethe’s telling of the story, both because it’s inspired so much music and because it’s the version I’ve actually read.
As we all anxiously await the final episode of Breaking Bad, it’s impossible not to wonder/theorize/obsess over how the story will end. Taking Cranston’s use of “Faustian” here further than he probably intended, I’m going to recast the main roles in Faust with characters from Breaking Bad, looking at each character through the lens of a Faust-based work from the classical music canon. The exercise might give us some clues about what will happen to these characters, or, failing that, provide something to mull over while waiting to see what actually happens.
Walter White: Faust
Faust is an unhappy scholar, a man suffering from extreme ennui who craves more than his life can afford him. After he comes close to killing himself (but decides against it), a demon, Mephistopheles, appears to him and guarantees that he can bring Faust whatever he desires. In a moment of hubris and greed, Faust agrees to a deal with Mephistopheles: the Devil will be his servant while he’s on earth, and Faust will be the Devil’s servant in hell. If Faust ever reaches a moment in which he is finally truly happy, the Devil will claim his part of the bargain.
Having watched all but one episode of the final season of Breaking Bad, I can’t help but feel like Walt has already arrived at the second half of Faust’s deal. As soon as Walt got everything he wanted—he’d retired from the meth business with tens of millions of dollars, his wife no longer appeared to hate him, and he could finally enjoy a leisurely outdoor meal with his extended family—it was all snatched away.
The piece: Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust (1846)
As has been the case for Breaking Bad, the critical acclaim for La Damnation de Faust outdistanced its popularity. Berlioz adored Goethe’s version of the tale, and his libretto is based mainly on Faust, but his narrative does have some variations. Berlioz sets the bargain at the end of the work, after Mephistopheles tells Faust that if he wants to save Margaret (more info on her below) he must sign a contract in which he agrees to become the Devil’s servant the next day. Faust signs it, and he and Mephistopheles ride back towards Margaret to save her—except, in reality, Mephistopheles is taking Faust straight to hell and does nothing to save Margaret.
If you’ve seen the Breaking Bad episode “Ozymandias,” the exchange above may remind you of the scene in which Walt tries to bargain with the neo-Nazis for the life of his brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader, offering them $80 million in exchange for keeping Hank alive. The Nazis do take most of Walt’s money, but they also murder Hank. Walt must then return home through the desert, abandon his family members, who now fear and abhor him, and live out his remaining months as a hermit in the New England cold until his cancer kills him (or so he initially thinks).
Crystal Meth: Mephistopheles
Someone I told last week about this post asked how it would be possible for Breaking Bad to be Faust without a character on the show standing in for the Devil. In actuality, there have been several versions without the Devil—and in many versions of the Faust story the protagonist is not dealing with Satan himself, but one of his minions, e.g. Goethe’s Mephistopheles. We’ve seen Walt align himself with several representatives of the Business Partners from Hell while pursuing his goals (see Krazy 8, Tuco Salamanca, Gustavo Fring) but he’s somehow managed to escape them all until now (see Neo-Nazis).
Of course, despite its perennial snub at the Emmy Awards (not even a nomination!), the most important supporting character in Breaking Bad is methamphetamine. We see some incarnation of it in nearly every episode, and its introduction to Walter is what inspires him to change his life. Watching a news report about a meth-lab bust with Hank, Walt witnesses all the wealth the crystal meth business can yield, providing you (1) are decent with chemistry and (2) don’t get caught.
Meth offers him everything he wants, but is just as upfront with the eventual consequences of the deal as Mephistopheles. Walt ignores this fact, though—because of his recent lung cancer diagnosis, he figures he’ll be dead before he can be brought to justice.
Gounod’s Faust, while based on Goethe’s play, deviates greatly from its source material. According to Grove Music Online, “The main objection is that the librettists transformed Faust, a seeker for knowledge (or experience, or power), into an operatic lover; but this merely proves that composer and librettists understood the nature of the genre, and of opera as a business operation, better than their educated and literary critics.” The opera was a great success when it opened and remains immensely popular.
In Gounod’s version, Mephistopheles interrupts a man singing a song about a rat (which is sung in full in the Berlioz version—see below) to sing a song about the golden calf and mankind’s self-destructive devotion to money. (This replaces the song Mephistopheles sings Goethe’s Faust, about a king and his flea; this text was set to music manytimes, too.)
Meth as Mephistopheles (Methistopheles!) is cynically aware of what Walt truly wants—what he thinks the whole world wants—and offers it up to Walt, who gradually learns to ignore the difference between what’s truly right and wrong in order to accept it.
Skyler White: Margaret
The third character from Goethe’s Faust who needs to be accounted for is Margaret, aka Gretchen, the woman Faust loves. In Breaking Bad, we’re shown only two women with whom Walt has been in love: his wife, Skyler, and his ex-girlfriend, who happens to be named (gasp!) Gretchen.
Faust instantly falls in love with Margaret and seduces her with lavish gifts. Eventually, he persuades her to let him stay with her one night, giving her a sleeping potion that she can give her mother so they won’t be found out. Faust impregnates her that night.
She later tries to go to church to pray as usual, but is scared away from confessing her sins by a host of demons (bringing to mind the scene in last Sunday’s “Granite State” when the neo-Nazis invade the baby’s nursery in the Whites’ home to scare Skyler away from giving any information to the police). Later Margaret is imprisoned after accidentally killing her mother with the sleeping potion and, having gone insane, drowning her baby.
I’m loath to bring it up, but could this all bode ill for baby Holly? Breaking Bad has been ruthless and cold when deciding which of its characters to kill off. While I’m not convinced that Holly isn’t going to make it, the implication from Todd and co. is that if something did happen to either of the White children, it would be Skyler’s fault. (In a show with so much German thrown into characters’ names—e.g. Heisenberg, Ehrmentraut, Schwartz, Schrader—and which features a five-and-a-half-minute opening sceneauf Deutsch, the fact that “Tod” is the German word for “death” might not be a coincidence.)
At the end of Goethe’s Faust Part 1, though, Margaret is saved by an angel chorus that exclaims “She is redeemed!” and calls her up to Heaven. So perhaps the ending for Walt’s family doesn’t have to be that bleak.
The piece: Franz Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (1814)
Schubert composed this song when he was 17 years old (more than halfway through his life). He was another Goethe devotee, and composed more than sixty lieder on texts from the writer’s oeuvre. This is one of his best known, and it quotes directly from a scene in Faust. In it, Gretchen sits at her spinning wheel (represented by the circular motif in the piano), thinking about Faust. She’s troubled by how overpowering his seduction of her is, and feels herself losing her mind and her inner peace while obsessing about how it feels to be with him.
I recently rewatched a disturbing scene from the fifth season of Breaking Bad in which Walter comes to Skyler in bed and begins foreplay with her while talking about the justification for all the horrible things they have done. This occurs as she looks away, horrified. She has absolutely no power to escape him, no matter how many times she’s tried. Her life is so tied up with his that severing herself from him seems, in this scene at least, impossible.
One key difference between the two stories is that Margaret never stops loving Faust, and never sees him as an evil man.
Jesse Pinkman: The rat
There is, of course, a major character missing a Faustian equivalent: Jesse Pinkman. I considered creating a parallel version of the cast that would assign Jesse to the part of Faust. However the last episode plays out, I think many Breaking Bad viewers would agree that Walt might not be Faust, but the Devil. He approaches Jesse when he’s vulnerable, promises to improve his way of life, then destroys every element of it.
But despite my desire to cast Walt as the Devil in this scenario, I’m not sure it fits. When I was watching La Damnation de Faust, however, there was one section that eerily reminded me of Jesse’s current predicament:
It’s a story told via drunken bar patron about a rat who lived happily on fat and butter in a kitchen. The cook poisoned the rat, and the creature pathetically reels around the house, gnawing everything in sight and drinking from puddles to alleviate the feeling inside, which won’t go away. Eventually the rat simply runs into the stove and dies, and the cook laughs. The translation of the refrain “Als hätte sie Lieb’ im Leibe” is given as “as if it were in heat”, referring to the wild manner in which the rat reacted to the poison. The literal translation, though, and one that applies to Jesse, is “as if it had love in its body”.
As we discover in the final season, the lowest life form in the estimation of Walt (the meth cook) is that of a rat. And Jesse is never more prone to tragedy or despair than when he’s in love. Walt has been poisoning Jesse throughout the show’s story arc, and any time Jesse thinks his existence can’t get any worse, he dooms himself further.
The trouble with all of this, of course, is that there are so many different endings to the Faust story, at least in terms of the fate of the titular character. Margaret is consistently redeemed; the rat, when he’s mentioned, always dies; maybe we can count on these endings for Skyler and Jesse. But the fate of Faust himself is up to the composer—in this case, Vince Gilligan.
Update (2 October 2013): The Breaking Bad finale aired on Sunday. The more than 10 million people watching that episode also heard, but may not have noticed, an excerpt from Gounod’s Faust (the second musical example below) playing in the scene in the Schwartzes’ home. This was a far more subdued musical cue than the use of “El Paso” or “Baby Blue”, but its Easter Egg quality made it all the more satisfying to catch. (And knowing the extreme level of Breaking Bad‘s attention to background—or foreground—detail, there’s absolutely no way that it was a coincidence.) I was really pleased that Gilligan (or possibly his music adviser) agrees with the premise that Walter White’s story and Faust’s are not so different.
Jessica Barbour is the Associate Editor for Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. You can read her previous blog posts, “The 1812 Overture: an attempted narration,” “Baseball scoring,” “Glissandos and Glissandon’ts,” and “Wedding Music,” and you can learn more about Berlioz, Schubert, Gounod, Goethe, Faust, and the operas mentioned above with a subscription to Grove Music Online.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
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Image credit: Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Episode 15. Photo by Ursula Coyote/AMC. Source blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad. Image used for the purposes of illustration. (c) AMC. All rights reserved.
The last generation whose members will be forced into death by aging is alive today. It won't be the youngest of us, born in the past few years - they, most likely, have thousands of years ahead of them. It won't be the oldest of us either, as even under the plausible best of circumstances we are twenty to thirty years away from a widespread deployment of rejuvenation therapies based on the SENS research program. As to the rest of us, just who is left holding the short straw at the end of the day depends on the speed of progress in medical science: advocacy, fundraising, and the effectiveness of research and development initiatives. Persuasion and money are far more important at this early stage than worrying about how well the researchers are doing their jobs, however.
We live in a world in which the public is only just starting to come around to the idea that aging can be treated, and demonstrations of rejuvenation in the laboratory could be achieved in a crash program lasting ten to twenty years, at a comparatively small cost. But still, most people don't care about living longer, and most people try not to think about aging, or the future of degeneration and sickness that awaits. They think it is inevitable, but that is no longer true. If you are in early middle age today in the first world, then you have a good shot at living for centuries if the world suddenly wakes up tomorrow and massive funding pours into rejuvenation research. You will age and die on a timescale little different from that of your parents if that awakening persistently fails to happen.
Crowdfunding on Kickstarter and related sites is still the new new thing, the shine not yet worn off. One of the truths that this activity reinforces is that it is far, far easier to raise funding for the next throwaway technological widget than for medical research projects aimed at the betterment of all humanity. Research crowdfunding is a tiny, distant moon orbiting the great mass of comics, games, and devices on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. Hell, it's easier to crowdfund a short film that points out how close human rejuvenation might be to the present day than it is to crowdfund a project to actually conduct a portion of that research. Is this a reflection of rationality? You decide, though it could be argued either way regarding whether a dollar given to raising awareness is more valuable than a dollar given to the researchers at this point in time. Both research and persuasion need to happen.
Set in the future when science first begins to stop aging, a daughter tries to save her father from natural death. The story takes place roughly 30 years in the future at the moment when science has first figured out how to stop aging through genetics. It is framed around the gulf between generations that would occur with the first release of this technology. A daughter who works for a company called Aperion Life - the first to bring this new technology to the public - wants to save her aging father. She starts him on the trials but he soon stops coming. The film continues with the conflict rising between them as she wants him to live on with her while he feels a natural ending is more human.
The film centers itself around the natural conflict that would exist at this divide. Upon developing this story, I've asked many people and I've found a pretty even 50/50 divide of opinions strongly on one side or the other- either they want to die naturally and believe there is beauty in finality, or they want to see what the future holds and have more time to explore and learn more in life. I'd like to turn the question to you... Which side are you on? Would you want to live on or die naturally?
I feel this is a film that needs to be made. Asking these questions in the form of art and story will help start the discussion. Our world is changing very fast and the rate of technology is speeding up. What does all of this mean for humanity? Everything we know, from a book to a play to a song, ends... What does it mean when there is no ending? Would we be more complacent? Would life be as meaningful? Is there more of a beauty in the way it has always been with our passing or is there more beauty in our bodies and minds staying fresh and alive for many, many years to come? What about social justice and overpopulation? Would life become boring after living on indefinitely or would you find it exhilarating to have time to learn new languages, instruments, subjects - to read more books, to love more - to live several lifetimes? Would it be worth it if some of your most loved friends or relatives passed on and wouldn't live on with you? Are you interested in seeing what the future brings in technology and social evolution or are you happy to have contributed and be a part of it for a short time?
Chicago filmmaker Tim Maupin launched a Kickstarter for a short film titled, "The Last Generation to Die." Maupin thinks now is a great time to start a conversation about life extension. And he's right. The idea that within decades a genetic fountain of youth may plausibly reverse the aging process, even indefinitely stave off death, seems to be rising up in pop culture. Maupin's Kickstarter has so far raised over $15,000 - $6,000 more than its initial funding goal. Encouraged by the positive response, they're dreaming bigger and hope to fund a stretch goal of $25,000 in the last 10 days of the campaign.
If Dr. Seuss created Jurassic Park, it would probably look (and sound) a lot like this bananas creation Seusstastic Park. Behold, all the stripey wonder!
However, some so-called parents — names withheld — are still threatening to sue the victim for what their little scumbags children did because Holloway had the audacity to post the teens’ own social media pics on his website, www.helpmesave300.com.
Teenagers partied and destroyed Holloway’s home over Labor Day weekend, after they broke into the house to throw a huge soiree.
Holloway, who played for the Raiders and Patriots, has revealed that the Stephentown 300 teenagers caused over $20,000 worth of damage.
He was in Tampa, Florida, for the holiday, when his son revealed that he had noticed tweets informing him of a party inside their home in upstate New York.
The ex-footballer told CNN, “I thought it was a joke. I’m looking at these tweets and they’re saying, ‘I’m partying with the NFL,’ ‘I’ve never seen so much alcohol in my life,’ ‘I can’t wake her up,’ ‘Oh, we’re being busted,’ ‘We gotta hide,’ ‘Get rid of all the drugs’.”
By the time Holloway had contacted police, the damage was already done. Partiers had stolen various items, spray-painted the walls, and even made off with an eagle memorial for his stillborn grandson.
The memorial has since been returned and the three people, who allegedly stole it, were charged with felony Grand Larceny, according to police.
Holloway contacted the teenagers to help him clean up his home, as he is set to host a picnic for 1,000 military people. Fifty volunteers eventually arrived, and helped him to clean, but only four of them were from the party.
(Also, one tearful mother apologized to Holloway outside the courtroom on Thursday. To put these pitiful mea culpas in perspective, investigators have said that between 100 and 200 of the Stephentown 300 will face charges. That’s a regret rate of about 2.5 to 5 percent.)
Holloway continued, “We had learned that they had broken in. They used a couple of different ways to enter the house. They broke and kicked in a couple windows. They came in through one back door. They took a ladder and came in through the window. I blew past furious to what’s important: How do we save these 300 lives that thought this was a good idea?”
Holloway would rather have the kids take responsibility for their actions, apologize, and get off the long road to ruin than press charges, but he hasn’t ruled it out.
Nevertheless, for some imbecile “parents,” Holloway is to blame for compromising the anonymity of their youngsters’ criminal behavior. One mother even told Fox23News.com that she planned on taking legal action against Holloway.
(Can we PLEASE pass a law now that any parent, who would actually sue a victim over their child’s criminal activity, automatically gets their child taken from them and placed into the foster care system? Seems fair.)
The case is certainly a sad statement on the decline of parenting in the US. Parents — in this case, more than 95 percent of them — have tried to strip away the concepts of shame, punishment, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions.
Unfortunately, they don’t realize that even if their hooligans escape legal action, the only thing they’re not saving them from are repercussions. In other words, the “real world” will eventually eat these kids alive, and when that happens, it will be, 100 percent, their parents’ fault.
Everyone today talks about the sad state of the world and how the country is going to hell in a hand basket. To the parents of the Stephentown 300, the next time you hear yourself stating a similar sentiment, we say this: “Congratulations. You’re the reason.”
Do you think the Stephentown 300 parents should face criminal charges and/or be held financially liable for what their little morons did?
Undoubtedly hoping to once and for all settle this "Obamacare" thing, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota appeared on CNN on Friday to defend the Republican push to defund it. Host Wolf Blitzer challenged Bachmann's assertions, leading to a lively-if-weird segment.
So who won the debate? To figure this out, we went point-by-point, awarding points and evaluating the debate. We don't want to give away the ending (Blitzer won) so read on! (The full clip isn't yet at the CNN website, but it is available at Mediaite.com.)
Round 1: Will women and children will die under Obamacare?
CNN introduced the segment by noting Bachmann's comments from the floor of the House, seen at right, as well as the president's refutation of those arguments during his speech on Thursday. (We've pulled out Bachmann's transition to a smile, below.)
Blitzer: Do you really believe if this law — and it is a law passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed into law by the president, approved by the Supreme Court — goes into effect that women, seniors, children are going to die?
Bachmann: That's the greatest fear that Americans have. And the president got a big applause line when he made that statement. But it will be very unpleasant if the death panels go into effect — that's the IPAB board. If we have denial of care for women, children, senior citizens. Or if we have problems where people aren't given the drugs that they need — maybe they'll be denied drugs for breast cancer. You bet this can happen. That is what i'm worried about. People all across the united states. This is literally an issue of life and death.
Winner: Blitzer. Bachmann is afraid that Obamacare will lead to denials of drug coverage and to denials of care for women and old people, that maybe people with breast cancer won't get medicine. Because those things never happen under the current system! Actually, the breast cancer one probably doesn't, because no insurance company would cover someone with so severe a preexisting condition. Go Google "denied coverage" and see what comes up. Is it nothing? No? Then maybe Bachmann's point — which she twice blames on the American people at large — is invalid.
Oh, also, there are no "death panels" unless you want to just call whatever you don't like a "death panel." Obama should start calling the IPAB the "free ice cream panel," and see how that goes over.
Round 2: Will Obamacare help or hurt more people?
Blitzer pressed the point.
Blitzer: Don't you realize that … millions and millions of Americans will now have health insurance; earlier, they didn't have health insurance.
Bachmann: Millions and millions of Americans are losing health insurance right now. They're being thrown off their employer-paid health insurance …
Blitzer: But they'll be eligible to go to the exchanges and buy insurance.
Bachmann: Not necessarily. I was in a meeting this morning. We were told again that the people thrown into the exchanges, the health care premiums that they'll have to pay — even when they're subsidized — will be more than what they're paying now. I firmly believe that we could see that more people are actually going to be negatively impacted by Obamacare than helped. Just the office of what the president's hopes were.
Winner: Blitzer. Honestly, if Bachmann had just stuck to this weird "meeting" she was in, she might have taken this one. While the price of insurance in the exchanges being established next month are lower than expected, there will be cases where exchange plans are more expensive than what someone might otherwise have paid.
But her other points are just inexplicable. "Millions and millions of Americans are losing health insurance?" What? Where? We looked at the effect on businesses and found some roll-backs in coverage, but by no means enough to affect millions of people. That's a lot of people! Bachmann, a fan of hyperbole, let her rhetoric get away from her.
As she did when she instinctively replied "not necessarily" to Blitzer's assertion that those imaginary millions could sign up for insurance on the exchanges. "Not necessarily"? Necessarily! That's why they exist! You can't rail against the mandate of coverage and then say coverage is optional! That's cheating!
Round 3: Should taxpayers cover people without insurance who go to emergency rooms?
Blitzer: Is it fair that people who can afford to buy health insurance could become freeloaders and taxpayers will take care of them if they get into an emergency medical situation? Is that fair?
Bachmann: The fairness … that is … lacking in Obamacare is clear because President Obama has changed Obamacare over 19 times now. He has an uneven playing field. So if you are a political favorite of the president's, you've just got an exemption. Big business got a huge exemption, not the American people!
We're just going to jump in here and say Winner: Blitzer because Bachmann's response is nonsensical and incorrect. In the video, you can see her scrambling for a response. She picked a bad one. (Big business, for example, is hardly a political favorite of the president.)
Anyway, continuing:
Blitzer: Are you happy there are people out there who have money but they decide they don't want to buy health insurance — but that we'll take care of them no matter what?
Bachmann: What you're talking about is a very, very tiny percentage of the American people. ...
Blitzer: Have you been to an emergency room? You see what's going on?
Bachmann: My oldest son is a physician. I've been to an emergency room many times.
Blitzer: So you know, you know who shows up. These are people who don't have health insurance, and we take care of them.
Bachmann: Quite often it's illegal aliens. Illegal aliens show up, so we the American taxpayer are picking up the tab for people who aren't American citizens.
Blitzer: That's another subject. What about if you're an American citizen and you could afford to buy health insurance and you don't. You just want to take advantage of the situation.
Bachmann: The bottom line of your question, Wolf: Is it fair that the American people are picking up the tab for other people's health care. we have over 300 hundred million Americans. The estimate was 46 million Americans didn't have health care, but that also included illegal aliens. We know now the estimate from the government is that about 30 million people are going to be cut off their employer's health insurance because of Obamacare.
Blitzer: I don't know where you're getting …
Bachmann: This is a very bad, bad conclusion!
Blitzer: I don't know where you're getting 30 million people.
Bachmann: From the government. From the federal government.
Blitzer: That's not true. You have to show me those numbers.
Yeah. Winner: Blitzer. Unless Bachmann was told these "federal government" numbers in this unidentified meeting this morning, it's not clear where they come from. There are a lot of numbers in the neighborhood of 30 million that float around in conjunction with Obamacare, many of them repeated and revised on anti-Obamacare websites. So maybe these are classified numbers the administration only shared with Republicans? Unclear.
Anyway, there aren't many Americans who don't have insurance who go to the hospital, because the hospital is simply choked with undocumented immigrants. As with so much else in Bachmann's world, it is their fault. A 2000 study found that the total cost of these immigrants' healthcare that year, including emergency room visits, was just north of a billion dollars. Less than one percent of Medicaid costs cover that community.
The interview goes on for another five minutes, mostly not about Obamacare and mostly less contentious. But in this modern Lincoln-Douglas contest, the winner was clear: the long-standing-but-flawed CNN anchor easily dispatched the retiring congresswoman. But everyone came away smiling.
In the interactive installation “What Will You Leave Behind?” by Nino Sarabutra, visitors are invited to walk on 100,000 miniature porcelain skulls that cover the floor of a gallery. Sarabutra enlisted a range of people, from relatives to students, to help make the skulls—she asked all of them to contemplate their lives as they worked. The installation is on display at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Singapore through October 13, 2013.
As of this moment Vladimir Putin’s government is holding in custody the Arctic Sunrise, the command ship of the environmental activist organization Greenpeace International. The ship was seized by armed members of the Russian Coast Guard last week after Greenpeace activists tried to board an offshore oil platform as a protest against drilling for fossil fuels in the fragile environment of the Arctic, where global warming has reduced the sea ice cover 40 percent since 1980.
On this week’s broadcast Bill Moyers talked with the executive director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, about the fate of the Arctic Sunrise and the charges of piracy brought against the crew of 30. Naidoo tells Bill, “If there’s injustice in the world, those of us that have the ability to witness it and to record it, document it and tell the world what is happening have a moral responsibility to do that. Then, of course, it’s left up to those that are receiving that knowledge to make the moral choice about whether they want to stand up against the injustice or observe it.”
In an essay following the conversation, Moyers links Naidoo’s courage in speaking truth to power with an account of the recent visit by Pope Francis to Sardinia, the Mediterranean island known for its beautifully beaches and palatial homes owned by the richest of the rich. Sardinia is now blighted by widespread joblessness – 51 percent of its young people are out of work — and as the pope heard the stories of desperation and deprivation, he threw away his prepared speech and decried a global economic system “that does us so much harm.” The story leads Bill to conclude that unless we “dethrone our present system of financial capitalism that rewards those at the top” while everyone else is struggling, “it will consume us” and democracy will be finished.
Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company.
As expected, the third of this week's trio of Steam-related announcements from Valve is a new controller designed to be used with SteamOS in the living room. And from what Valve has revealed, this isn't a mere copy of the now practically default dual-stick design, but a new kind of controller that will even work with PC games designed for a mouse and keyboard.
Where the two thumbsticks sit on a traditional gamepad, Valve's controller has a pair of circular, textured, concave, high-resolution, clickable trackpads that allow for "far higher fidelity input than has previously been possible with traditional handheld controllers" that "approaches that of a desktop mouse," Valve said.
"Traditional gamepads force us to accept compromises. We’ve made it a goal to improve upon the resolution and fidelity of input that’s possible with those devices," Valve wrote in its announcement. "The Steam controller offers a new and, we believe, vastly superior control scheme, all while enabling you to play from the comfort of your sofa."
A map of a region known as Deuteronilus Mensae, in the northern hemisphere of Mars, shows the locations of ice deposits that have been detected by the Shallow Radar instrument of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The deposits are depicted in blue. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/University of Rome/Southwest Research Institute)
Still, though, the water detected in the soil (in this case, of the Gale Crater, the area the rover is exploring) is a big deal -- a confirmation of yet another way that Mars and Earth are more similar than it may appear to the naked eye. The news came via a series of five papers published in the journal Science -- the first set, The Guardian's Alok Jha notes, "of formal, peer-reviewed results from the Curiosity mission." The papers offer details of the scientific experiments Curiosity carried out during the first four months it spent tooling around on the Martian surface. And investigations into the planet's water content were among them.
How much water, actually, is present in the soil of Mars? A decent amount, it seems. According to Laurie Leshin, the dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the lead author of the Science paper that confirmed the existence of water in the soil, "If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you'd get a couple of pints of water out of that." Which is, she notes, "a couple of water bottles' worth that you would take to the gym." (NB: Don't take Martian water to the gym.) Overall, Leshin and her colleagues estimate, the Martian soil contains about 2 percent water by weight. Which is still arid by Earth standards ... but moister than nothing. It means that if you're looking for water on Mars, as Leshin puts it, "You don't need to go to the polar caps. You don't need to dig way down deep."
This image of a slope inside Mars' Newton crater, combines orbital imagery with 3-D modeling to depict water flows that may have appeared during Martian springs and summers. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)A look at Mars's McLaughlin Crater, annotated to show the locations of minerals and clays created by water in the ancient past. Billions of years ago, the region may have been a groundwater lake. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)The HiRISE camera also imaged a gully that may have been carved by flowing water.(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)An artist's rendering of the ancient oceans thought to have covered ancient Mars 3 billion years ago. The image is based on the actual topography of Mars, as measured by NASA's Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. (G. diAchille via Space.com)An artist's rendering of Mars as it might have appeared more than 2 billion years ago. The ocean fills the lowland basin that now occupies the north polar region. (Taylor Perron/UC Berkeley)
Update: I neglected to include, in the series above, the most detailed and definitive water-on-Mars image -- created by Ellen Roper, archived by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, and sent to me by reader Paula Naughtin:
Architects: gmp Architekten
Location: Nuremberg, Germany
Design: Meinhard von Gerkan and Nikolaus Goetze
Associated Partner: Dirk Heller
Project Leader: Karen Schroeder
Design Team: Christoph Berle, Katharina Traupe, Monika Braig
Implementation Team: Christoph Berle, Miriam Bamberg, Judith Saile, Alexander Schnieber, Sui Jinying
Area: 9327.0 sqm
Year: 2013
Photographs: Heiner Leiska
From the architect. Today, the Evangelical Lutheran State Church of Bavaria is inaugurating its new archive in Nuremberg with a special ceremony. The new building, which was designed by architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp), took three years to build and is located on a former factory site in the direct vicinity of the existing main building. With 34 kilometres of shelving, the State Church archive now has more than twice the storage space compared to previously and, in addition, accommodates a restoration workshop and enough space for visitor rooms. In the “Memory of Evangelical Bavaria”, the Church is archiving amongst many other original documents – letters by Martin Luther and documents by popes and emperors, as well as numerous historically important books and paintings. The State Church archive has been designed to include passive air conditioning of the archives.
The new building consists of two intersecting solid cubes which seem to float above a transparent receding ground floor. The structure rises from a basement floor about one metre high along the road, which develops into full storey height along the downward slope towards the south, including a large terrace which offers views of the Wöhrder See lake. The ensemble consists of a solitary building sculpture with main facades on all sides. It thereby confines the adjacent Zeissstrasse on the one side, and the garden of the Theological Seminary to the east on the other side. Seen from across the garden, the new archive appears as a continuation and extension of the Theological Seminary. The plinth of the reinforced steel structure is clad with reddish sandstone which forms a continuation of the existing sandstone wall and anchors the building in the landscape context. The external walls of the archive are finished in a shiny copper facade with a subtle vertical structure. The natural metal surface will undergo various oxidation stages and colour changes until it finally develops a velvety, brownish appearance.
Visitors enter the public areas of the archive via Veilhofstrasse. From there they also reach the lecture hall, which can also be used for exhibitions. This hall faces the corner of Veilhof-/Zeissstrasse in a manner that welcomes the public. The reading room faces both east and west and is located on the quiet garden side. The offices are located above, on two levels surrounding the archive areas, and provide easy access for members of staff to the repository. The repository areas themselves occupy four floors above the ground floor, as well as the two lower ground floors. Since the first lower ground floor extends out on the slope towards the south, access is available from Zeissstrasse to the workshop and functional rooms.
Josh Rogin, a Newsweek Daily Beast correspondent, already was having a bad time watching Dan Nainan do stand-up on Wednesday. And then, reportedly, Nainan made things worse by punching the journalist. In the face. Rogin was livetweeting the "Funniest Celebrity in DC" at the DC Improv, where Nainan was the headliner. The journalist made a few cracks at the comedian's expense, and then things only got worse when Nainan somehow got wind of those tweets, it seems. Here are the tweets in question:
Dan Nainan was funny until he dusted off his 2005 Katrina jokes in a gratingly bad GWB impression. #DCImprov
Nainan, according the New York Times, bought a ton of fake Twitter followers (nearly 220,000 of them) a couple of years ago to raise his profile. Also, here's a video of a whole bunch of people, including Barack Obama, saying they like Nainan:
The United States and Russia are both running out of options in Syria, and their joint initiative to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control and destroy them is only a potential and unlikely solution to one part of the Syrian crisis. The plan pushed by Russian president Vladimir Putin will probably not solve the chemical weapons problem and could very well exacerbate it and the real challenge of the Syrian crisis—the jihadist threat.
President Barack Obama and his administration missed the moment two years when it was possible to support a moderate opposition in overthrowing the brutal regime of Bashar Assad. The Obama administration then compounded matters. It rushed to judgment about the world’s obligation to punish Assad for allegedly crossing a poorly thought out ‘red line’ by using chemical weapons without providing any concrete evidence to allies and potential partners that Assad had done the attack. According to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in a September 15 interview, the Obama and Putin administrations had been discussing the danger of Assad’s chemical weapons falling into jihadi hands since the June 2012 G-20 summit in Los Cabos, and the Obama administration had even contacted people around Assad on the issue. Thus, Secretary of State John Kerry’s seemingly spontaneous musings about a fictional agreement under which Assad would turn over those weapons that was picked up on by Putin functioned as a ‘dog whistle,’ if unintended.
If we ever undertake the grand project of space colonization, we’ll have more than just engineering problems to contend with. We’ll have to figure out how sex looks—and feels—when you’re living in a closed ship in the middle of the cosmos.
My slender waist and thighs
Are exhausted and weak
From a night of cloud dancing.
—Huang O. (1498-1569), translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung
The near-light-speed drive is engaged, and a sliver of humanity is finally moving away from our Sun towards a distant new home. While the space colonists initially play out their lives in a close approximation of life on Earth, a new branch of humanity is already evolving aboard the interstellar ship. Leaving the planet is new for our species, but the evolutionary processes that resulted in this astounding migration are as ancient as life itself: reproduction, variation and selection. Over the course of generations in interstellar space, the genome of the starship community will be subtly reshaped. The culture, too, will rearrange its norms to make for pleasurable life in such a new reality.
While multigenerational human life in space is still science fiction, many research groups worldwide are already sketching out the required technologies. At Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to achieving interstellar flight by 2100, for example, physicists work on the arcana of near-light-speed propulsion; I work on the population genetics for voyages such drives would make possible. After all, although the success of interstellar voyages will depend on technology, it will also hinge on humanity’s ability to succeed in new social and demographic arrangements. The human coevolution of genes and culture is diabolically complex; a century of anthropology has come to little agreement about historic patterns in cultural evolution, much less predictions for the future. But we must begin somewhere. So let’s start with something interesting.
Let’s start with sex.
After all, wherever you sit on the spectrum of “Nature versus Nurture”—another question anthropology has yet to resolve, perhaps because it is a false choice—sex, as in biological procreation, is going to have to continue to work beyond Earth. And sexuality, as in how sex is manifest interpersonally, cannot be considered much less than secondary to this most imperative of human concerns.
Some science-fiction films, like the 1979 Bond movie Moonraker, have experimented with zero-gravity sexuality to great effect. But sexuality in space settlements would be much more complex than just a question of positioning.
Where do we begin with sex and sexuality in space? The post-modern, post-structural, post-everything French intellectual titan Michel Foucault famously asked how and why sex shifted from a purely biological function in the nonhuman world to a political and economic entanglement in the human one. In the generation since that immense question was posed, few compelling answers have arisen, aside from the obvious commodification of something almost universally enjoyed. Voyaging in Foucault’s seas of postmodern mirage can be a thrill, but for the moment, we have basic issues to sort out, and I will stick to more Newtonian shores.
We can start with sex biology. Roughly one billion years ago, a new form of replication appeared on Earth. Rather than producing the next generation by budding off near-clones from individuals, some life forms began to produce it from the combined DNA of two individuals; the sexes. Shuffled DNA resulted in offspring differing enough from their parents and siblings that even new forms of Natural Selection evolved. Ages later, with the evolution of complex culture in our lineage, Homo, all manner of sexuality appeared as elaborations on the core issue of reproduction.
A Massachusetts Medical School space biologist recently stated that sex is very difficult in zero gravity…you have no friction. This seems particularly unimaginative.
Will this essential aspect of being human—having two discrete sexes—change radically on the centuries-long timescale of interstellar migration? Not likely. The essential fertilization of the egg cell by the sperm cell will continue. Some super-futurists would like to change that, envisioning, for example, radical experiments such as sending female-only crews on a journey in which they would be artificially fertilized from sperm banks. But a stellar ark with an all-female population, likely just as dysfunctional as an all-male population, would be a long-term disaster, because evolutionary processes are generally intolerant of such radical change to established systems. We are much more likely to succeed with a more tested method of fertilization. For centuries and longer the fact of two biological sexes in our species will remain and will continue to influence sexuality.
Fair enough; now, how will we procreate beyond Earth? Science fiction authors have often lingered on the titillating prospects of zero-gravity sex, but we’re unlikely to undertake any long-term journeys in the micro-gravity environment of Low Earth Orbit where humanity has spent most of its experience in space. That’s because all the research has demonstrated that a low-G environment is crippling to the human body and its processes. It is simply not an option for multi-generational voyages.
Physicist Gerard K. O’Neill imagined O’Neill cylinders, giant pressurized structures, spun up to approximate Earth gravity by centrifugal force, as possible space habitats.
What to do? The best solution is to rotate starships, creating an artificial gravity. This was beautifully envisioned in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is a known technology. But even as interstellar arks make this motion, the central hub of the hurtling star-cities would remain zero-G sites likely to bear witness to every imaginable experiment in human sexual delight. A Massachusetts Medical School space biologist recently stated that, “Sex is very difficult in zero gravity…you have no friction,” but this seems particularly unimaginative. Remember, space migrants won’t be astronauts programmed to follow strict minute-by-minute schedules for 90-day flights; they will be normal people living out their entire lives. Sexual experimentation in the future will be nothing new—except that it may well include floating in the central hubs of immense interstellar craft.
Earth-bound norms regarding homosexuality, heterosexuality, monogamy or plurality could either erode or become entrenched among interstellar migration cultures. There is no saying exactly how this will play out—could we have predicted the differences in human sexuality between 16th-century and modern England?
What larger issues of sexuality will play out in the vast interstellar spaces? Population genetics tell us that healthy interstellar populations should be in the tens of thousands; one configuration would be eight, 5,000-person villages. Sexually speaking, what do we see in similar demographics on Earth today and in the past? We see everything. Humanity has invented a wide variety of solutions to the questions of sex and sexuality. Even among the most outwardly conservative settlements and communities worldwide, every shade in the spectrum of human sexuality and sexual activity remains alive: multiple genders are known in traditional Samoa, for example, while the marriage arrangement of polyandry—a woman having multiple husbands—is common in highland Tibet village life. There are many ways to be human.
As on Earth, I imagine that so long as domestic arrangements are harmonious, caring for the interstellar young, all will be well, and variable. Earth-bound norms regarding homosexuality, heterosexuality, monogamy or plurality could either erode or become entrenched among interstellar migration cultures. There is no saying exactly how this will play out—could we have predicted the differences in human sexuality between 16th-century and modern England?—but the fact that interstellar ships will be closed ecosystems has one important implication. Even migrant populations as large as 50,000 will have to suppress a cultural imperative that has been with agricultural civilization for the last 6,000 years: to produce as many offspring as possible.
For agriculturalists, children are valuable laborers, but for most of human existence, population was strictly regulated to remain in line with the carrying capacity of, say, the Outback, or the Arctic. We can learn from extant foraging communities and from the archaeological records of their ancestors. Their rituals and taboos, their regulations of sexuality to keep populations low, might once again be of great value to our species.
Once space colonists arrive at their desired exoplanet, however, things will change yet again. The migrant population will be expected to explode upon arrival because—as we have learned in conservation biology on Earth—larger populations of any organism are always safer from extinction (local or general) than smaller populations. This will drive yet another shift in the cultural details of sex and sexuality, reenacting the demographic shift from foraging to farming that occurred millennia before, back on Earth.
How will sexuality play out in space? Take your pick, so long as it doesn’t interfere with maintaining a healthy population, or exceeding the limits of the space ark. Wherever we go, humanity will be characterized by change; for millions of years, our behavior has been decoupled from our biology by powerful cognitive processes and tool use. This adaptive ace up the sleeve gives us tremendous behavioral variation, allowing us to proactively adapt to new conditions by mind rather than reactively, by body. For humans settling a new planet, cultural variables related to sex and sexuality will all shift, differing from that of their ancestors long left back on Earth and from that of the generations that crossed the gulfs of interstellar space. Sex will continue—it will have to—and the solution to questions of sexuality will be to to have many solutions, as it does on Earth.
We have, more than any other species on the planet, found a way to simultaneously incorporate sex and sexuality into the very fabric of our daily lives. In this way, no matter how far we travel, we’ll carry our cultural history with us, a kind of sexual ripple that recycles over generations. Like the adolescent who moves away from home to establish him or herself as a new, independent person, how will the diverse body of humans who set sail to a distant star evolve their sexuality over hundreds of generations away from “home”? We won’t know until we try it.
Fortunately, that kind of anthropological experiment can be a lot of fun.
Police Chief Steve Bracknell, who is responsible for the Florida town where George Zimmerman resides, agreed in a series of emails that Zimmerman is a “ticking time bomb” and another “Sandy Hook” waiting to happen.
Bracknell expressed his views in response to two emails from Santiago Rodriguez, who reached Bracknell through a contact form on the police department’s website. Bracknell confirmed the emails’ authenticity to ThinkProgress and subsequently tried to distance himself from the remarks.
Rodriguez’s first email was an extended, and sometimes angry, critique of how the Lake Mary Police Department handled their response to the recent altercation between George Zimmerman, his wife and his father in law. Rodriguez told Bracknell that he had a responsibility to charge Zimmerman because he was another “Sandy Hook… waiting to happen.” Bracknell responded with a detailed defense of the police department’s conduct, but explicitly endorsed Rodriguez’s comments on Sandy Hook.
Asked to elaborate on his email, Bracknell attempted to distance himself from Rodriguez’s comments, saying he did not agree and was “referring to the fact that [Zimmerman] seems to be involved in incidents” involving firearms.
In his second email, Rodriguez called Zimmerman a “ticking time bomb” who will snap “sooner or later.” Again, Bracknell agreed.
The full email exchange between Rodriguez and Bracknell is available here.
The police are still deciding whether or not to charge Zimmerman in connection to the incident. They are attempting to recover video of alleged assault that Zimmerman’s wife, Shellie, recorded with her iPad. Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, acknowledged that Zimmerman broke the iPad into pieces before the police arrived. According to witnesses, Zimmerman also punched his father-in-law in the nose.
In her call to 911, Shellie Zimmerman told the police that Zimmerman was threatening her with his gun. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. I’m really, really scared,” Shellie said.
Zimmerman told police at the scene that he did not have a gun, according to Bracknell and a police department spokesman. O’Mara, however, insisted on CNN that he did have a gun on him during the entire incident. Bracknell told ThinkProgress that one of them isn’t “telling the truth.”
What is not in dispute is that Zimmerman, despite his legal troubles and the police chief’s concerns, is still permitted to carry a concealed weapon in the State of Florida. In Florida, unlike other states like New York and New Jersey, authorities have no discretion over whether to grant or revoke concealed carry permits. Dr. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, recently told Salon, “You’ve got all kinds of George Zimmermans and everything in between there who fall through the cracks of our exclusions. But if you ask any reasonable person how comfortable they are with an individual like that running around with a concealed, loaded gun, the vast majority would say they are not.”
Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Last week, I posted a piece attempting to address a conflagration of concern that had flared up amid reports that the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan is continuing to release radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. More specifically, a blogger or two had expressed the opinion that “Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over.”
Following an admittedly brief spate of investigation, my initial reaction, “Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Won’t Turn You Into a Mutant,” was rather the opposite. However, in an effort to balance reporting and expertise with entertainment and humor — most notably the amount of radiation contained in your average, every day banana — my greater point may have suffered. Commenters on the blog questioned everything from my intelligence to my ethics, and many raised legitimate questions about the potential impact of the radioactive particles that have been released into the Pacific.
So I pledged to follow up, and went straight to the experts, primarily Dr. Ken Buesseler, Senior Scientist in Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Dr. Buessler was literally on his way out the door to catch a flight to Japan to continue his research, but he took a moment to read my post and return my email. His reaction:
Mike- I like [your] line “Let’s be clear: leaked radiation is bad. This is a problem that needs urgent, international attention. But at least for now, I’m happy to reassure Joe Romm and all the parents of Facebook: your fish are not glowing with Fukushima radiation. Eat up!”
Dr. Buesseler also pointed me to a Fukushima FAQ page on his department’s website that he set up to answer the influx of questions he has received on this particular issue.
In the context of seafood consumption, the most important thing to determine is the potential degree of harm that can come to someone who eats fish that may contain higher-than-normal quantities of potentially dangerous isotopes. This begs a few specific questions:
1. How much radiation is out there? 2. Where is it? 3. What concentrations are harmful to humans? And of course: 4. Seriously? Radioactive bananas?
How much radioactive water are we talking about?
Last month, the Japanese government reported that the Fukushima plant was leaking approximately 300 tons, or 71,895 gallons, of contaminated water each day. That’s a lot of water—except when you compare it to the Pacific Ocean, which is estimated to contain 187,189,915,062,857,142,857 gallons. That’s 187 quintillion for those counting at home. So as a quick comparison, even if the site continues leaking 72,000 gallons per day for 10 years, the total amount spilled would be 262.8 million gallons. This is a tall drink of water to be sure, but it is still just .00000000014 percent of the volume of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, anyamount of leaked radiation is bad, so we’ll get to the part about exactly how bad this stuff is in a minute.
It’s also likely that additional water could seep, or is already seeping, from various other containment devices—hence the news that Japan will construct ice dams or other containment structures to help hold back the radioactive flow. In short, this kind of engineering nightmare makes BP’s months-long struggle to plug the Macondo oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 look like a People magazine crossword puzzle (13 across: Skywalker pal Han ____).
Containing Fukushima radiation is not likely to be resolved anytime soon, so:
The spread of cesium once it enters the ocean can be understood by the analogy of mixing cream into coffee. At first, they are separate and distinguishable, but just as we start to stir the cream forms long, narrow filaments or streaks in the water. The streaks became longer and narrower as they moved off shore, where diffusive processes began to homogenize and dilute the radionuclides.
Dr. Buesseler and others have suggested that radionuclides will reach U.S. shores “some time in late 2013 or 2014” but that “at the levels expected even short distances from Japan, the Pacific will be safe for boating, swimming, etc.”
Some studies predict that over the next 5 to 10 years, concentrations on the North American Pacific Coast could actually be higher than those off Japan, but the total amount of radioactivity will be well below the current levels near the crippled nuclear plant because of dilution throughout the Pacific Basin.
Should we be worried about the quantities found in our fish?
It goes without saying that we should monitor our seafood and water quality with extreme care. As for the specifics of what to look for, we turn again to Dr. Buesseler:
Seawater everywhere contains many naturally occurring radionuclides, the most common being polonium-210. As a result, fish caught in the Pacific and elsewhere already have measurable quantities of these substances. … cesium [forms] a salt taken up by the flesh that will begin to flush out of an exposed fish soon after they enter waters less affected by Fukushima. By the time tuna are caught in the eastern Pacific, cesium levels in their flesh are 10-20 times lower than when they were off Fukushima.
Cesium will still be more concentrated in larger, carnivorous fish higher up the food chain, such as bluefin tuna than in smaller fish with diets consisting more of plankton and algae, but because it will “flush out” of the fish’s flesh, concentrations will not necessarily mount over time.
An area of greater concern to Buesseler is the increasing quantity of strontium-90 detected in the waters near Fukushima. Unlike cesium, strontium accumulates in bone rather than muscle, and it is not rapidly flushed from the fish. The good news here is that aside from consumers of small fish such as sardines, which are eaten bone-in, most diners will not be eating strontium.
How is the federal government testing Pacific Ocean seafood?
The lead U.S. agency testing seafood for contamination is the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. As of June 20, the FDA has tested 1,313 samples of food imported from Japan, including 199 seafood samples. Of those, just one—a sample of ginger powder—exceeded the level considered safe for consumption.
When contacted about its testing of domestically caught seafood, an FDA spokesman responded in an email, saying that “the FDA is not aware of any evidence suggesting that the domestic seafood catch contains harmful levels of radiation.” He further referenced a 2012 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found levels of cesium-137 and cesium-134 in bluefin tuna to be, according to an email from the FDA, “roughly 300 times lower than levels that would prompt FDA to investigate further to determine if there were a health concern.”
How does nuclear waste differ from the radiation emitted by a banana?
Nuclear radiation exists in many places in our daily lives. Perhaps the most commonly cited example is the average, everyday banana.
Bananas have enough naturally occurring radiation that science communicators developed a metric called the Banana Equivalent Dose, or BED, as a means of explaining in user-friendly terms how much radiation a given thing emits. The BED represents the amount of radiation the body receives from eating one banana and roughly equates to 0.1 nanoseiverts. A seivert is the unit used to measure exposure. An arm x-ray is equivalent to 10 BED. A flight from New York to London: 400 BED. A chest CT scan: 70,000 BED. A fatal dose is roughly 80 million BED. Most of the radiation in bananas comes from potassium-40, which is processed naturally by the body, but some of it arrives in the form of polonium-210, the isotope used in a massive dose to kill former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Of course, the radiation in bananas is different from what’s in leaked nuclear wastewater. For starters, while bananas’ radioactivity occurs naturally, nuclear waste contains isotopes, including cesium-137, which are exclusively and deliberately generated by human activity—specifically, the process of nuclear fission.
Radiation released in the decay of radioactive isotopes is classified in three types—alpha, beta, and gamma—and each type has different strengths and properties. Banana radiation—potassium and polonium—is alpha radiation, while cesium and strontium fall in the strongest category, gamma rays. The radioactive particles also have different half-lives—a half-life is the amount of time it takes for 50 percent of a given compound to decay. The half-life of cesium-137 is 30 years; for polonium-210, it is 138.4 days.
So while eating a serving of Pacific bluefin tuna will expose someone to roughly one to five BED, according to a paper Buesseler and his colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late 2012, that does not mean the potential harm is the same as eating a handful of bananas. But so far, according to Dr. Buesseler and the FDA, we have no reason to fear the amount of radiation in domestically caught fish.
Recall that cesium-137 and other affiliated nasty particles have been part of our lives in varying quantities since the first nuclear tests occurred in the 1940s and ‘50s. While the Fukushima release represents a major influx of the material to the natural environment, when it comes to ocean contamination, it still represents little more than a drop in the proverbial bucket. At least for now, except for fish from the immediate area around the Fukushima plant, Pacific Ocean seafood remains safe to eat.
And as for the commenter who suggested I feed tuna to my kids every week? I’d gladly do so if only I could get my six year-old to eat it.
For those who have money to burn, there are now Shine 24K gold edible rolling papers to roll up your “legal smoking herbs.” The company who created them states that they “decided to start experimenting” and after many tests they finally “had the perfect mix of gold on the outside and a perfectly consistent burning paper on the inside.” You can purchase them online.
Australian photographer Lincoln Harrison is now well-known for his magnificent long exposure photography of radiant, swirling stars illuminating the night sky. Each remarkable shot after the next is a breathtaking document of the luminous, starry Australian nights Harrison diligently stayed up, from sunset to sunrise. The images utilize the natural rotation of the earth to present a spectacular spiraling pattern in the sky, like a magical backdrop to an otherwise serene landscape.
We're pleased to announce that all of the images featured in this post are now available as prints and canvases through our art store, My Modern Shop.
Today, in addition to new evidence of Willingham's innocence, the Innocence Project is alleging corruption in the trial, the Texas Tribune reports:
In a 1999 episode of The Simpsons, Homer Simpsons accidentally created the tomacco - a tomato and tobacco hybrid.
Let's zoom in over western Washington. What a contrast! More then 10 inches over the higher Olympics, while about a half inch over Sequim. A factor of 20...amazing. In Sequim on Saturday there will only some light rain. Over Puget Sound there will be a strong north-south gradient in precipitation...a lot more in Tacoma than Everett.
Now, there is a another threat that must be mentioned. A small but intense low center will form on Sunday over the Pacific and will move northeastward, crossing somewhere between the Olympics and central Vancouver Island. Here are two solutions for Sunday at 8 PM. The UW NAM-MM5 has the low over Tatoosh, Big threat of strong winds over Puget Sound.
While the WRF-GFS takes it a bit far northwest. Both bring strong pressure gradients and strong winds to the coast, which you can expect 40-60 mph gusts.
The WRF surface winds for this time, show sustained winds of 35 kts (40 mph) along the coast and over the interior waters of NW Washington. Gusts would be considerably higher.
The interview goes on for another five minutes, mostly not about Obamacare and mostly less contentious. But in this modern Lincoln-Douglas contest, the winner was clear: the long-standing-but-flawed CNN anchor easily dispatched the retiring congresswoman. But everyone came away smiling.
The United States and Russia are both running out of options in Syria, and their joint initiative to place Syrian chemical weapons under international control and destroy them is only a potential and unlikely solution to one part of the Syrian crisis. The plan pushed by Russian president Vladimir Putin will probably not solve the chemical weapons problem and could very well exacerbate it and the real challenge of the Syrian crisis—the jihadist threat.
