Gentlemen, we can rebuild him…

This week: The Balsa Wood Titanic, The Phantom of Winnipeg, May Day and Occupy’s Second Wave, Kim’s Favorite Bedtime Story, the Dark Knight of Sterling Heights, MI and The Pornographic Jihad.

Personnel –  Joe Nolan, Nicholas Pell,  Joseph Matheny, and Ken Eakins.

[powerpress]

Pell is a dapper mofo.

Links

• The Titanic Strikes Back – Link
• Winnipeg/Phantom  - Link
• Clouds will save us from global warming. – Link
• Terrorists hide their plans in porno vids. Who knew? – Link
• Kim’s favourite bedtime story – Link
• Occupy May Day – Link
• The Bee Sting Rises – Link

Musical Interludes

ARNOLD!

Cya next time ladies and gents.

Alterati: The Inside Scoop on the Outside Culture » Coincidence Control Network

AccuWeather's 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season forecasts 12 named tropical storms, five named hurricanes and two major hurricanes.

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Scientific American

I thought I was done with this miniseries on alcohol, yeast and civilization, but several people have written me asking about one particular mystery of great relevance to their lives, lager beer. And so here you have it, the seventh ( see the first , second , third , fourth , fifth and sixth here) in my miniseries on civilization, fungus, and alcohol.

If you have had a beer lately, especially if it was in a can and cost less than two dollars, it was probably a lager. Lager has become almost synonymous with beer, yet the story of lager is among the most enigmatic of all the stories of the foods and drinks we ferment. It is just one of the mysteries I have been thinking about lately, the other involves a monkey.

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Scientific American

Computer generated image of Mars at daybreak. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A glowing fireball descended through the sky over North Africa last July, accompanied by two sonic booms. Observers saw the fireball turn from yellow to green, then split into two parts before one fell to the ground in a valley and the other crashed into a mountain. And then nothing, for a while.

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Scientific American

LONDON — The world is far behind on delivering the low-carbon energy it needs, and unless urgent action is taken, calamitous climate change is certain, the International Energy Agency told a meeting yesterday of energy ministers whose countries account for 80 percent of global energy demand.

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Scientific American

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Scientific American

In 1936, whilst studying for his Ph.D. at Princeton University, the English mathematician Alan Turing published a paper, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, which became the foundation of computer science. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by simple instructions encoded on a paper tape. One Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single Universal Machine that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem, performing any task for which a program could be written sound familiar? He d invented the computer.

Back then, computers were people; they compiled actuarial tables and did engineering calculations. As the Allies prepared for World War II they faced a critical shortage of human computers for military calculations. When men left for war the shortage got worse, so the U.S. mechanized the problem by building the Harvard Mark 1, an electromechanical monster 50 feet long. It could do calculations in seconds that took people hours.

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Scientific American

In 2001, in the face of a widespread famine, a then 14 year-old Malawian William Kamkwamba decided to find a way to secure a better future for his family. After he was forced to drop out of secondary school due to the tuition requirements, William used a local library to glean as much knowledge as he could from its books. And, through physics textbooks and engineering journals, William found a way to provide his family with a more secure and prosperous future.

In the library, William learned about the physics behind wind energy. Inspired by diagrams and pictures of windmill designs, William decided to build two of these machines. The first provided electricity to power his family’s home. The second provided an arguably more valuable commodity – a constant supply of drinking and irrigation water for his family’s farm.

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Scientific American

This week: Iran’s giant Intranet, Bradley Manning needs to go home, Anonymous creates a new Megaupload?, Goodbye Lulzsec – hai thar Malsec, FBI seizes another mailer, Who’s to blame for oil spills?, Hole drummer’s documentary, Surviving Progress, Debt, and three boobies!

• Iran unplugs the Interbutzz – Link
• Bradley Manning’s got balls of steel – Link – Better Link
• Anonymous’s Megaupload? – Link
• Goodbye Lulzsec, hello Malsec? – Link
• FBI Seizes European Counter Network – Link
• Oil Spill – Link
• Doc about Hole drummer Patty Schemel – Link
• Matheny Media Minutes: Surviving Progress – LinkTrailer, Debt: The First 5000 Years – Link, Blade Runner Sequel – Link

Musical Interludes

• •  Dual Core - The Game
  • Russian Circles - Carpe
  • Rasat. asad - Jarboe

Alterati: The Inside Scoop on the Outside Culture » Coincidence Control Network

Music, film and video game makes face a new online, digital world. And some are testing a revolutionary pricing system: "pay what you want." But a new study finds that when consumers can name their own price, many may opt out of buying at all. The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [Ayalet Gneezy et al., " Pay-what-you-want, identity, and self-signaling in markets "]

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Scientific American

Shree Bose, who won the grand prize at this year's Google Global Science Fair, credits her love of science to her big brother, Pinaki. As a child, he had a habit of teaching her what he'd just learned in science class. How atoms work, for example.

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Scientific American

One of the world’s rarest birds has a little bit more breathing room this week. The Giles Fuertesi Nature Reserve in the Colombian Andes, home to the critically endangered Fuertes’s parrot ( Hapalopsittaca fuertesi ), has doubled in size following the acquisition of an additional 144 hectares of neighboring land. The acquisition was a joint effort by Fundaci n ProAves , which manages the reserve, along with the American Bird Conservancy and other organizations.

Fuertes’s parrots , also known as indigo-winged parrots, were thought to be extinct for 90 years after their only known habitat was logged and cut down in 1911. About a dozen individuals, however, were discovered by ProAves biologists in 2002 in the area that would later become the nature reserve. Conservation efforts since then have brought the population up to an estimated 250 birds, about a fifth of which live in the reserve, where man-made nest boxes have been used since 2004 to provide safe breeding sites. The nature reserve was formally established in 2009.

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Scientific American

Today’s program features, first of all, a conversation between Matt Pallamary and Wild Bill, who begin by reminiscing about the legendary Palenque Entheobotany Seminars, but who then go on to other wild tales, some of which may actually be true. After that is the first of our long-awaited Global Trialogues in which Bruce Damer answers a question from a young man in Australia.

Psychedelic Salon

A trip to an unfamiliar part of the world is all you need in order to realize that humans have vastly different ways of eating, playing, talking, problem-solving, and so much more. Some of us use forks, while others prefer chopsticks, and still others simply eat with their hands. All three of these solutions emerged to the very same problem. But where do these cultural traditions come from? How do these differences persist over time? If we wish to understand the evolution of culture, then it is important to understand how how cultural traditions in other species emerge.

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Scientific American

Credit: Franck-Boston/iStockphoto

On April 24, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported the fourth confirmed case of mad cow disease in the U.S., the first since 2006 . In an official statement , the department s chief veterinary officer John Clifford said that the animal (a dairy cow from central California), was never presented for slaughter for human consumption, so at no time presented a risk to the food supply or human health. That s good news: it means that the USDA protection system banning cattle that cannot walk on their own and testing them for disease worked. But this latest discovery also suggests that a new case will appear every few years and that a few such cows may have entered the food system in the past.

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Scientific American

LONDON — A seemingly trivial task – playing a particular video game – may lessen flashbacks and other psychological symptoms following a traumatic event, according to research presented here at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference.

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Scientific American

Two provocative ways to see long-term changes on earth are currently being promoted in honor of Earth Week . A Web site by NASA, and an app from HarperCollins, both show striking side-by-side satellite images of locations that have changed dramatically over time spans of up to 30 years or more. The primary intent is to show how we humans are altering the planet s surface.

NASA has posted more than 160 comparative views on a Web site it calls State of Flux . The sharp images are grouped into categories, such as human impact (see below).

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Scientific American

Apple has long enjoyed the reputation of making a computing platform that provides security protection that is superior to its peers–in a word, Microsoft. The emergence of a group of malicious software (malware) programs in recent months– collectively known as Flashback or Flashfake –that specifically target Macs and their OS X operating system now has Apple in the unfamiliar position of being on the defensive. [More]

Scientific American