Luke.stirling

FIFA, the comically corrupt governing body of international soccer, has suffered hard times of late: several executives were collared by the law, it became apparent that World Cup hosting rights floated on a sea of bribery, and an expensively-financed biopic of glorious leader Sepp Blatter bombed at the box office.

Blatter himself escaped serious trouble throughout the crisis, though he was ultimately forced to promise resignation—a promise he has yet failed to fulfill.

Swiss prosecutors have provided an incentive, however, in the form of long hoped-for criminal proceedings against The Blatt. USA TODAY:

The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) opened criminal proceedings against FIFA president Sepp Blatter for possible criminal mismanagement and misappropriation of FIFA money.

After Friday's meeting of the FIFA Executive Committee, Blatter's scheduled news conference was cancelled and he was interrogated by the OAG.

Blatter's office at FIFA headquarters in Zurich was searched and data was seized.

If you follow my tweets of interesting stories from one year ago, you'll have seen the Roca Labs saga popping up again. Roca sold a "non-surgical gastric bypass" that was mostly made from industrial food-thickeners that were supposed to gunk up your stomach and fill you up.

Their terms of service included a gag-order that let them sue you if you posted a negative review -- e.g., if you told other prospective customers that it made you sick as a dog.

Now the FTC is cracking down on them, launching a suit that includes a motion for a restraining order that Adam Steinbaugh describes as "pure brass knuckles" -- it's a joy to read.

The FTC alleges that Roca used deceptive advertising, and asks to have the gag-clause invalidated and accuses the company of intimidating witnesses.

Essentially, Roca Labs advertised, among other things, that its product was "scientifically proven to have a 90% success rate" and that it was "possible" to lose up to 21 pounds per month. These claims were backed by a letter from a "Dr. Ross F." — also known as Dr. Ross Finesmith, who had been barred from practicing medicine after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography — which cited and summarized literature that didn't review or study Roca Labs' products, but instead referenced studies of ingredients which were used in Roca Labs' products. Roca Labs bolstered the impression that its products were super effective by cloaking itself in an aura of scientific research and medical expertise: through its name ("Roca Labs"), references to its "medical team" and "research center", and usage of photos and videos of people wearing lab coats emblazoned with the caduceus symbol (which also appeared in the company's logo).

The FTC also contends that Roca Labs' gag clause — and the company's practice of offering a financial incentive for positive reviews — contributed to these deceptive practices. Customers could buy the product without a gag clause, but it would cost approximately three times as much, resulting in "99%" of consumers agreeing to the clause, which prohibited essentially any negative commentary about the product. One iteration of the clause established a $100,000 penalty and threatened consumers with revocation of the 'discount' and subsequent reports to credit bureaus.

This practice, according to the FTC, deprived consumers of "truthful, negative information" which might have deterred would-be customers from buying their products. Then, relying on this clause, Roca Labs "threatened complaining purchasers who have sought refunds by telling them that they would be subject to liability for extortion or defamation for threatening to post, or posting, truthful negative reviews about the Defendants, their products, or employees[.]" In some cases, the company disclosed confidential health information in legal filings and to "credit card processors and banks" when customers issued chargebacks.

Further, in lieu of allowing unfiltered customer feedback to inform customers, Roca Labs provided a financial incentive to customers to provide positive reviews and, when that wasn't enough, faked it. The company operated a website that advertises Roca Labs' product without mentioning that… it's Roca Labs running the site. So when the site claims that "we challenged the company's claim to a '90% success rate' by checking some of the 654,000 video results we got when searching for 'Youtube Roca Labs'", that's somewhat misleading. Although not directly stated in the complaint, this is misleading both because the site is operated by Roca Labs and because those positive videos result from Roca's financial incentive for customers to post reviews and its heavyhanded "don't criticize us" clause in its contract.

FTC Sues Weight Loss Company Roca Labs Over Gagging Customers [Adam Steinbaugh/Popehat]

Zoanthid corals are a favorite with aquarium hobbyists -- beautiful and easy to grow (easy being a relative term -- coral's always a pain in the ass).

Most people who keep coral know that they have to be careful when handling it they can poison you on contact with palytoxin, which bonds to sodium-potassium ATPase and disrupts the potassium/sodium balance in cells, killing them (and in sufficient doses, killing the organism too). What wasn't well-known (until a rash of emergency room visits in Anchorage) is that fragments of coral that are left exposed to air release an invisible, highly toxic gas that can seriously poison everyone in your home.

The man who showed up in the ER on August 12 had not worked with or handled a zoanthid coral. But one of his relatives had. Just 7-8 hours earlier, this relative had transferred 70 pounds of live zoanthid coral from a plastic container into the patient's 200 gallon aquarium inside his 1,600-square-foot mobile home.

While this was being done, some pieces of the coral fell on the floor, and some live polyps broke off.

Two people were sleeping in a room next door. The man who later showed up in the ER got home later and slept for seven hours in the same room as the aquarium.

All through the night -- and let me emphasize that you just can't make this stuff up -- the coral seems to have exuded some sort of creeping death mist. According to the CDC's venerable Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, “Patients A and C noted a visible mist and sensed humidity in the mobile home on the morning after coral introduction, leading them to suspect a possible problem with the aquarium.”

The next morning, all three people awoke with a nasty suite of neurologic, breathing, and muscle problems. The man who'd slept in the room with the aquarium was worst off. His fever had reached 103°F and his white blood cell count was elevated. He spent two days in the hospital before recovering.

Aquarium Corals of Anchorage Poison 10 1/2 Humans, 2 Dogs and 1 Cat [Jennifer Frazer/Scientific American]

(Image: A colony of "dragon eye" coral, Kazvorpal, CC-BY-SA)

In the wake of iOS 9's new ad-blocking functionality, The Wall Street Journal reports that makers of ad-blocking apps are accepting payment from publishers to let ads through.

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users. In total, ads from some 700 companies meet the acceptable ads policy, an Eyeo spokesman said. Eyeo is now reaching out to developers of other ad-blocking tools to cut deals that allow certain ads to pass ads through their filters, too, in exchange for payment.

The adblocking companies are presenting themselves as a quality control service, but it looks an awful lot like a racket.

Matt Buchanan:

If your adblocker takes money from you in order to block ads, and then takes money from huge companies in order to show you the ads that you paid for it to block, then yes; it’s just using you to erect a tollbooth.

It's not just publishers that are being hit hard. Adblockers are hurting retailers, whose product offerings get nailed, even in their own online stores. Dan Primack:

A Fortune investigation shows that an iPhone enabled with Crystal — the top paid iOS app right now – is unable to fully render the e-commerce sites of many major retailers, including Walmart, Sears and Lululemon.

The issue was first brought to our attention by Chris Mason, CEO of Branding Brand, a Pittsburgh-based company whose platform powers mobile commerce sites and apps.

Most publishers are sensitive to ethical considerations, but giant publicly-traded retailers—think Walmart—will do everything they can to circumvent adblocking. Here is Sears' website, when accessed on iOS9 with the top adblocker installed.

Sears will kill puppies to get that fixed.

Maki illustrated two great truths about trolls:

• They’re all about making sure only people like them get to be part of a community.

• They’re so busy policing purity, they don’t bother to contribute productively.

His commentary is also spot on.

In a field where people work day and night to make sure every kid has a chance to become excited about science, the thought that there are old white dudes publicly sneering at a teenager because he wasn’t ingenious enough is sickening. Seeing people who identify as skeptics entertain wild conspiracy theories about a sinister muslim boy and his plot to get arrested for attention would be hilarious if it weren’t so toxic.

It’s a good thing to keep in mind: trolls aren’t necessarily simply frivolous haters who are out to destroy everyone’s fun for laughs. Sometimes they’re so very committed to the goals of a group that they dedicate themselves to non-stop hatred of the perceived enemies of that group, internal and external.

There’s been a lot of large spaceships or SHIPs (Seriously Huge Investment in Parts) building this month as part of SHIPtember – the build a 100 stud SHIP in a month contest. Some people feel that a month is slightly more time than necessary, and there have been several SHIP in a day builds over the years – with varying results.

So I wasn’t surprised to see someone attempt this again this year, but I was surprised to see FOUR master builders: Jason Allemann, Michael Gale, Kristal Dubois, Lucie Filteau join together in an amazing 24 hour build (or does this really make it a 96 hour man build?)

I don’t care, cause the end result makes my own personal month long SHIP build kind of small, and lacking in coolness…

Not only does this clock in at the bigger side of the SHIPs built this month, the multiple functions and delightful spinning mechanisms makes this stellar build, regardless of the time spent:

Oh, and yes, there’s a time lapse:

Take any whole positive number.

If it is an even number, divide it by 2.

If it is an odd number, multiply it by 3 and add 1.

Repeat whichever above step applies, over and over again.

The end result will always be the number 1.


For example:  7, 22, 11, 34, 17, 52, 26, 13, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.

The graph at the top shows the resulting sequence generated when starting with the number 27, with these intermediate steps:

27, 82, 41, 124, 62, 31, 94, 47, 142, 71, 214, 107, 322, 161, 484, 242, 121, 364, 182, 91, 274, 137, 412, 206, 103, 310, 155, 466, 233, 700, 350, 175, 526, 263, 790, 395, 1186, 593, 1780, 890, 445, 1336, 668, 334, 167, 502, 251, 754, 377, 1132, 566, 283, 850, 425, 1276, 638, 319, 958, 479, 1438, 719, 2158, 1079, 3238, 1619, 4858, 2429, 7288, 3644, 1822, 911, 2734, 1367, 4102, 2051, 6154, 3077, 9232, 4616, 2308, 1154, 577, 1732, 866, 433, 1300, 650, 325, 976, 488, 244, 122, 61, 184, 92, 46, 23, 70, 35, 106, 53, 160, 80, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1

Nobody understand why this happens.  The conjecture has been checked by computer for all starting values up to 2^64.  More at the Wikipedia entry.

Anil Dash is on fire in his editorial on all the ways that publishers, advertisers, brokers, readers, OS vendors, browser vendors, and users pass the buck when it comes to intrusive ads, ad-blocking, and sustaining ad-supported media.

“I’m a publisher. I let the ad networks handle the inventory. I have to worry about the bottom line, and our brand. I can’t get in the weeds with all this stuff.”

“We’re just an ad serving platform. We deliver the ads, and make sure they’re tracked. It’s not up to us what ads come through. Who are we to say?”

“We’re an optimization platform. Sure, we make the algorithm that decides which ads are displayed. But the software is neutral, it just uses math to decide. We’re not responsible for what buyers put in the system. And publishers can say no to anything they want to.”

“We’re buying ads because we’ve got something to sell. We have to use whatever techniques are gonna make us the most money. Don’t like it? Don’t take our money.”

How we pass the buck [Anil Dash/Medium]

Rightscorp is the publicly traded extortion racket that tries to force/bribe ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet unless those customers pay "settlements" for unproven allegations of copyright infringement.

Cox, a major ISP, is locked in a legal battle with Rightscorp, who represent a bunch of music publishers -- companies that control the rights to musical compositions.

Cox's lawyers have come up with a really interesting legal tactic. They say that Rightscorp only represents the composers in the songs they're suing over; they do not represent the performers. That means that when Rightscorp joined Bittorrent swarms to download the "evidence" they used to attack Cox, they were committing mass-scale copyright infringement against the recording artists in those songs.

Cox lawyers don't stop there! Anticipating that Rightscorp will say that the company's downloading was fair use, they argue that this means that Rightscorp acknowledges that in some cases, Bittorrent downloading is fair use. If so, they should have taken that into account when they started threatening Cox's subscribers.

The Cox motion is a thing of beauty, a wonderfully constructed argument that hoists the highest petard it's ever been my privilege to witness.

“Rightscorp either committed massive infringements of the sound recording copyrights or must have relied on the fair use doctrine. If the latter, that fact is an admission that activity over BitTorrent may constitute fair use, but there is no evidence that Rightscorp considered the possibility of fair use in generating millions of notices of claimed infringement,” Cox lawyers add. Cox goes on to highlight that Rightscorp targets elderly and disabled consumers, instructing its employees to disregard protests from alleged infringers. “When a consumer denies infringement, the phone script instructs the enforcer to state that the consumer must obtain a police report, and that the police may ‘take your device and hold it for ~5 days to investigate the matter’.” Finally, Cox highlights that the copyright holders have failed to directly address the alleged damage downloaders are causing. Instead of sending takedown notices to torrent sites asking them to remove infringing content, Rightscorp relies on these torrents to conduct its business.

COX ACCUSES RIGHTSCORP OF MASS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT [Ernesto/Torrentfreak]

Marsha Blackburn has represented Tennessee's 7th district for more than a decade, on behalf of the Republican party, whose caucus has elevated her to the vice-chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Rep Blackburn has told America to ignore the Pope's message on climate change. When pressed on the subject on a BBC interview, she said "the jury is still out" and that "different researchers" had assured her that the Earth was cooling; as to the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climage change: "I just choose to disagree with that."

When asked what evidence would convince her of the reality of climate change, she showed remarkable self-awareness, answering "I don't think you will see me being persuaded."

She also said that she did not accept the theory of evolution.

Professor Brian Hoskins, a leading climate scientist at the Royal Society said her remarks were "absolutely staggering".

"It is nonsense to say the world has cooled," Hoskins said. "If no evidence will persuade Ms Blackburn of climate change, that shows how well-founded her views are."

Ignore Pope on climate, says Republican Marsha Blackburn [Roger Harrabin/BBC]

The Womanizer is a German-made sex toy looks like an ear thermometer or a vaporizer. It comes in a variety of garish, bejeweled, leopard-spotted, and tattooed designs. It's not a vibrator. It's a gadget that suckles the clitoris. Vanessa Marin, a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex therapy, reviewed it for Lifehacker and said it "induces powerful orgasms in a shockingly short amount of time."

After about ninety seconds of use, this bedazzled ear thermometer had completely won me over. The suction sensation feels unassuming at first, but catches up with you real quick and pushes you over the edge into powerful, throbbing orgasms that feel remarkably different (and better) than vibration-induced orgasms. If you hold the Womanizer in place, this little workhorse will make you come over and over again with ease. It’s pretty awesome.

The Womanizer also offers a huge range of stimulation. The lowest level hardly feels like anything, and the highest feels like it could suck your clitoris straight off your body. All that variety means it can work well for a lot of women.

This Ridiculous Toy Will Give You One of the Best Orgasms of Your Life https://youtu.be/Xy0gKeZ879s

https://youtu.be/XKijMZhZ_Z0

This white budgie is grooming a cat friend, and the cat seems to like it. [HT: Falcor!]

As a life-long fan of artists such as Escher and Dali, this bizarrely warped train by Korean builder Amida Na really tickled my fancy. It’s entitled Folded Space Syndrome #1 so I’m really hoping this is the first in a series (even though it is just a digital render).

“Proprietary software is an unsafe building material. You can’t inspect it.”

Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen made that observation 5 years ago. It's timely today, as the Volkswagen emissions fraud scandal--enabled by proprietary software--worsens.

Volkswagen admitted this week it altered proprietary software on 11 million VW diesel cars, so they'd pass emissions tests when they were actually belching more smog.

“The breadth of the Volkswagen scandal should not obscure the broader question of how vulnerable we are to software code that is out of sight and beyond oversight,” writes Jim Dwyer at the New York Times today.

Mr. Moglen, a lawyer, technologist and historian who founded the Software Freedom Law Center, has argued for decades that software ought to be transparent. That would best serve the public interest, he said in his 2010 speech.

“Software is in everything,” he said, citing airplanes, medical devices and cars, much of it proprietary and thus invisible. “We shouldn’t use it for purposes that could conceivably cause harm, like running personal computers, let alone should we use it for things like anti-lock brakes or throttle control in automobiles.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Moglen recalled the elevator in his hotel.

“Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the early 20th century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected,” he said. “If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.”

“Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet”

[caption id="attachment_401447" align="alignnone" width="644"]
A VW Golf VII car is pictured in a production line at the plant of German carmaker Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, 2013. REUTERS[/caption]

Today is National Punctuation Day, so I thought it'd be good to go over the five basic;... "punctuation" rules.

Bakers, pay attention.

 

Rule #1: Sometimes periods, question marks, and exclamation points are important.

 

And they usually go at the end of the sentence.

(But what if it's not mine?)

 

Rule #2: Commas. Use them.

Unless you actually own an ass quitter.

 

Also note that the word "comma" can sometimes sound like "karma."

Just FYI.

 

Rule #3: Apostrophe's. Sure. Why not.

 

(And that's the FIXED version...)

 

Rule #4: When in doubt, throw in some extra exclamation marks.

What you lack in competency you can always make up for with enthusiasm.

 

Or, if you're REALLY confused, try some ellipses!

Eh?!

 

And finally:
Rule #5: Quotation Marks Are For Sarcasm, NOT EMPHASIS.

If it helps, just imagine Dr. Evil saying the bit you put in quotes.

 

 

 

Yep, just follow these five simple rules, and you'll be fine.

"Promise."

 

Thanks to Terry H., Mel P., Shawn G., Kate A., Chrissie G., Ebony M., Megan H., Christina M., Norma Jean, Andrea P., & Sarah V. for the extra dose of eeee-vil.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

Ah, don’t you love the sight of nonsensical claims getting vaporized by science? An engineer thought about Trump’s proposal to build a giant wall at the Mexican-American border. It turns out to be a non-trivial project.

Twelve million, six hundred thousand cubic yards. In other words, this wall would contain over three times the amount of concrete used to build the Hoover Dam — a project that, unlike Trump’s wall, has qualitative, verifiable economic benefits.

Such a wall would be greater in volume than all six pyramids of the Giza Necropolis — and it is unlikely that a concrete slab in the town of Dead Dog Valley, Texas would inspire the same timeless sense of wonder.

That quantity of concrete could pave a one-lane road from New York to Los Angeles, going the long way around the Earth, which would probably be just as useful.

Concrete, of course, requires reinforcing steel (or rebar). A reasonable estimate for the amount of rebar would be about 3 percent of the total wall size, resulting in a steel volume of 10,190,000 cubic feet, or about 5 billion pounds. We could melt down 4 of our Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and would probably be a few cruisers short of having enough steel.

But the challenge is far greater than simply collecting the necessary raw materials. All of these hundreds of miles of wall would need to be cast in concrete facilities, probably project-specific ones that have been custom built near the border. Then, the pre-cast wall pieces would need to be shipped by truck through the inhospitable, often roadless desert.

The men and women doing the work of actually installing the wall would have to be provided with food, water, shelter, lavatory facilities, safety equipment, transportation, and medical care, and would sometimes be miles away from a population center of any size. Sure, some people would be willing to to do the work, but at what price? Would Trump hire Mexicans?

This analysis also ignores the less sexy aspects of large-scale engineering projects: surveying, land acquisition, environmental review, geological studies, maintenance, excavating for foundations, and so on. Theoretical President Trump may be able to executive-order his way through the laser grid of lawsuits that normally impede this kind of work, but he can’t ignore the physical realities of construction.

But I don’t know — I’ve otherwise blocked Trump out of my mind for the last week or so. Is he still considered a viable candidate? Or have people yet realized that makes America look stupid?

I don’t. 

I live in a way that I do not see as perfectly moral. It’s the same as how I spend money on computers and dog food when I could be spending that money helping to cure malaria or feed children dying of curable diseases. I do my best…I send a lot of money to people developing better health care in the developing world, but not as much as I could. I also eat meat less than the average person in America, but not none at all. I try not to hate myself for living this way, but I also don’t pretend to have some magical rationalization.

I’m getting yelled at by people on Twitter because I support my union (SAG-AFTRA)’s efforts to negotiate a better contract for voice performers like myself who perform in video games. The most frequent complaint goes something like this: “actors work for maybe a few days at most on a game, and they want residual payments?! Programmers and others who work on those same games spend literally years…

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Joinyouinthesun posted 80 classic movie posters, in hi-resolution, with the text removed.

80 hi-res, textless posters (some of my favorites)

Everyone has probably seen still photos of this phenomenon, but the video is stunning. To see the vertical descent achieved by the leaping fox is truly jaw-dropping.

Via Presurfer.  Reposted from 2009 because it's still awesome.

Hovertext: I would be more open to your critique if it were expressed in radians.

New comic!
Today's News:

Thanks for a wonderful BAHFest East, everyone. I've never seen that auditorium so packed! 

Hovertext: It's almost as if these people can't use logic.

New comic!
Today's News:

The nation-state hackers who stole 5.6 million+ records of US government employees (cough China cough) also took 5.6 million+ fingerprints. But it's no problem: those people can just get new fingerprints and revoke their old ones right?

Oh, shit.

Biometrics are things that you can't recall, can't change, and that, by definition, are not secret. Authentication tokens are things that you can change, recall and keep secret.

“The fact that the number [of fingerprints breached] just increased by a factor of five is pretty mind-boggling,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “I’m surprised they didn't have structures in place to determine the number of fingerprints compromised earlier during the investigation.”

Lawmakers, too, were upset about the latest revelation. "OPM keeps getting it wrong," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). " I have zero confidence in OPM’s competence and ability to manage this crisis."

As fingerprints increasingly replace passwords as a day-to-day security measure for unlocking your iPhone or even your home, security experts have grown concerned about how hackers might leverage them.

OPM says 5.6 million fingerprints stolen in cyberattack, five times as many as previously thought [Andrea Peterson/Washington Post]

(Image: Fingerprint, Saurabh R. Patil, CC-BY-SA)

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Salesforce / Heroku, and a handful of other tech companies just betrayed billions of people's trust. They signed a letter endorsing CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act."

"It's a bill that would give those companies sweeping legal immunity to share your personal data with the government, enabling more surveillance and violations of civil liberties. Congress votes on CISA soon, and if more companies endorse it we'll be in big trouble. Thousands of people are fighting back. Get the full list of companies here, and spread the word so people know."

What's wrong with CISA?

If you’re not up to speed, CISA is a mass surveillance bill posing as a “cybersecurity” bill. Congress has been blindly scrambling to react to the OPM hacks, and their solution is a giveaway to the NSA and giant corporations:

* All privacy policies effectively null and void. Companies can share any private user data with the government, without a warrant, as long as the government says it is being used for a “cybersecurity” purpose.

* Data is shared with a wide array of government agencies, from the FBI and NSA, to the IRS and local law enforcement.

* In exchange, companies are given blanket immunity from civil and criminal laws, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping (if a violation was committed or exposed in the process of sharing data).

* Companies that play along can get otherwise classified intelligence data from the government, including private information about their competitors.

The following companies just betrayed billions of people.

Yesterday's story about a woman who made her Twitter account private because of harassment from men sparked a lot of discussion about how blocking and free speech interact with each other. Here's my $0.02 on the matter:

If you think "free speech" is the right to force others to listen, you actually believe in "compelled attention" #blocktogether

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) September 22, 2015

If you think "free speech" is the right to force others to listen, you actually believe in "compelled attention" #blocktogether [@doctorow/Twitter]

(Image: Individual silicone earplug worn at ear with Etymotic Research Filter-element ER-25, Kick the beat, PD)

The ongoing war in Syria has led researchers to make the first withdrawal of seeds from a "doomsday" vault in an Arctic mountainside, to protect global food supplies.

The Crop Trust reports that the newly-removed seeds, which include samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, were requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo which was damaged by the conflict.

“This diversity provides our scientists, breeders and farmers the raw material needed to improve agriculture to overcome the challenges of climatic changes, population growth, pests, and diseases,” the researchers say.

[caption id="attachment_423028" align="alignnone" width="937"] The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, research field station and gene bank in Syria.[/caption]

PRI did an amazing profile of the Aleppo seed bank earlier this year. You can listen or read here.

“We’re very lucky that [the rebels] realize the importance of conserving biodiversity; it’s one of the activities that has never been interrupted in Aleppo,” Ahmed Amri of the Syrian seed bank told the radio news network a few months ago.

“But we cannot predict how each day will be.”

[caption id="attachment_423038" align="alignnone" width="800"] Photo: The Crop Trust[/caption]

From Reuters' coverage:

"Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault," said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds - such as beans, rice and wheat - against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease.

It has more than 860,000 samples, from almost all nations. Even if the power were to fail, the vault would stay frozen and sealed for at least 200 years.

Their seed bank in Aleppo miraculously managed to keep functioning, partly, until now. The Syrian location included a cold storage, despite the ongoing war. But the Aleppo bank was unable able to perform its duty as a hub where seeds could be grown and distributed to other nations, primarily in the Middle East.

[caption id="attachment_423035" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Svalbard “doomsday vault.” Image: The Crop Trust[/caption] More from The Crop Trust's news release:

The vault was established in 2008, and is built to survive rising sea levels, power outages and other calamities that could affect the seeds. Its main storage area is kept well below freezing to preserve the contents, and it can hold 4.5 million varieties.

“There are seeds in the vault that have originated from nearly if not every single country,” Lainoff says. “It really is kind of the only example of true international cooperation. There’s seeds sitting on the same shelf from North Korea and South Korea, and they get along just fine up there.”

Around 500 seeds of each variety are contained within the vault, according to Lainoff, and the different varieties are key to genetic resistance against potential disease that could affect the world’s major crops.

What has caused the first withdrawal from the global vault is man-made, however, as fighting between the Syrian government and rebel groups, as well attacks from Islamic State militants, have devastated the country. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands and forced more than 4 million people to become refugees.

ICARDA managed to move its headquarters from Syria in the early days of the war, while some of its workers remained at the gene bank in Aleppo in an attempt to save the collection. The organization managed to duplicate 80 percent of its collection in Svalbard as of March this year, where the seeds were safely stored along with others from around the world.

In food security, as with computer security, redundancy is key. How amazing does the Svalbard seed vault look? I want to go there.

The tobacco industry knew that cigarettes were both addictive and carcinogenic. They sold them anyway, and hired professional obfuscators and lobbyists to bury the truth.

Now we know that the oil industry is the same way. Exxon knew how much carbon was buried in oil reserves. They knew how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. They were able to calculate in 1979 what burning all that oil would do to the carbon dioxide concentration.

They knew. They didn’t care what its effects were. They only cared about their bottom line.

You know, the future is going to look back on rabid capitalism as one of the damning pathologies of our history.

The phrase joins Cory Arcangel's "What a misunderstanding" as one that can be used to caption any New Yorker cartoon -- a fact discovered by Frank Chimero, the Louis Pasteur of New Yorker comics remixing.

New comic!

This is a 100% true comic. When I wake up in the morning, there’s always this little pile of my clothes that have been dragged out into the living room and… used. Oskar’s such a weirdo, but I only have myself to blame.

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