Verkalýðsbaráttan í Írak

Iraqi Labor Leader: We Will Defend Our Oil

Sögur frá Tsjernobyl

Land Of The Dead

Athygliverð grein um olíutoppinn

The Most Important Thing You Don't Know About "Peak Oil"

The world powers are positioning themselves for war. The war is over who can take the most oil. Those who secretly long for the coming collapse will be in for a shock. The initial oil shortage, when it does come, will certainly be a serious inconvenience, but the events which proceed after that are going to humble us all to the core.

Kurzweil spáir í framtíðina

Though Experiments: When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil

Pælingarnar hans Kurzweil eru alltaf jafn hressandi :).

Tvær góðar með sunnudagskaffinu

Naomi Klein: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

In January Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!” Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius.

Hér er svo enn eitt dæmi um hina miklu hræsni Bandaríkjastjórnar, ætti reyndar ekki að koma neinum nema algjörum fáfræðlingum á óvart.

Bush silent as top terrorist seeks US asylum

“If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist,” were the words used by President George W. Bush in justifying the invasion of Afghanistan three-and-a-half years ago and launching the campaign of worldwide militarism known as the global war on terror. However this does not seem to apply to terrorists that inflict terror on countries like Cuba or Venezuela. Case in point being the CIA-trained Posada Carriles who entered the US illegally and is currently asking for asylum.

Rauða Drottningin fær byr undir báða vængi

Afar áhugaverð grein, ekki láta hana fram hjá ykkur fara: Scientist Urges Dormant Eggs to Life to Test Evolution.

Ég reyndi að draga út úr henni meginatriðin en það gekk ekkert voðalega vel, best að lesa hana bara í heild :).

Bandaríkin, vagga vestrænnar trúarvakningar

Study shows many coeds have strong spirituality; 8 of 10 believe in God

Contrary to what many think, today's college campuses are hotbeds of religiosity and prayer, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California.

A survey of 112,232 current freshmen attending 236 colleges and universities (18 percent of them connected with religions) sponsored by the institute finds 8 out of 10 say they attend religious services, believe in God, and are interested in spirituality.

...

Alexander Astin, who headed the survey, said religious affiliation in mainstream religions is declining while spirituality is increasing. The study differentiated spirituality from religious commitment to a particular belief. Spirituality was defined as associated with spiritual quest, an ethic of caring, a compassionate self-concept, and an ecumenical world view.

He said students broke down into two "clear-cut religious clusters" at opposite ends of the spectrum. One included religions such as Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Baptists, and "other Christians," all of whom evinced little religious skepticism but lively religious engagement. Skepticism was defined as including beliefs such as the universe arose by chance, science eventually will explain everything, and disbelief in life after death. The other cluster included Unitarians, Episcopalians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Eastern Orthodox believers, who scored high on charitable involvement but showed significantly more skepticism about religion.

...

Students who say they are regularly engaged in religious practices, such as attending church services, are three times more likely to be politically conservative than liberal. And religious skeptics are more likely to be liberal. Those who go regularly to church are much less likely to believe that abortion should be legal, that sex out of marriage is permissible, that gays should be married, or that marijuana should be legalized. Forty-four percent of those who are highly engaged in their religions favor increased military spending, compared with 30 percent who are less involved in religious practices.

The survey's analysts said that more spiritual and religious students are physically healthier and tend to have better eating habits and do not smoke. But they reported being no more psychologically healthy than other students.

Síða könnunarinnar: Spirituality in Higher Education

Hin nýja bandaríska yfirstétt

'The New Aristocracy'

I am scanning a list of the 154 federal programs that President Bush would either zero out or slash in his fiscal-2006 budget, which Congress is now considering. It represents a triumph for the handful who—with Bush conservatism’s chief cheerleader and theoretician, Grover Norquist—would “drown” the federal government “in the bathtub.” In fact, it is an American tragedy in the making: a blot on our collective soul.

The wreckage is breathtaking. It includes termination of a program that tests bio-engineered food safety. Also proposed for axing are conservation programs for American forests and energy, flood prevention, funds for studies in advanced technologies, vital public telecommunications facilities (such as Internet access for schools and libraries), drug-free school programs, workers’ job retraining, vocational rehabilitation, enhanced teaching quality, adult education, community service, child emergency medical services, disease control and prevention, land and water conservation, rural fire-fighting facilities, hiring of police, protection of national parks, education of migrant farm workers, the miraculous Hubble space telescope, high-speed rail (advanced transportation long enjoyed in Europe and Japan), and vocational assistance for veterans.

...

In 2004, the 20 percent of households with the lowest incomes received an average tax cut of $250; the middle 20 percent received an average tax cut of $1,090; and the top 20 percent were blessed with tax reductions averaging $78,460. A third of the tax breaks—which Bush wants to make permanent—goes to the top 1 percent of households, those with an average annual income of $1.2 million.

In an article highly critical of Bush economic policy, Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., who bears a vaunted “old-money” family name, writes, “To him who hath more, more will be given.”

Few of the “hath littles” are aware of what’s being done to them. The middle and blue-collar classes are victims of declining wages, ever-higher health-care costs, and other price hikes—led by energy costs, the highest in history, and climbing. Behind the smokescreen of a glorious “patriotic war,” fear of terrorism, and pumped-up religious fervor lies a home-front war against the middle and blue-collar classes: a conservative counter-revolution, which aims at a colossal redistribution of wealth upward, to the New Aristocracy—supported by a self-serving rewriting of the law based not on legal principle but on “free-market” theory.

The intended result is the creation of a “peasant” class, driven to the bottom by the need to compete against cheap labor pools, such as India’s and China’s, working for the bargain-basement wages that are all the big-business scrooges will dole out.

With corporations unwilling to share their productivity gains with workers, as in the old days, and the American union movement in tatters, America’s struggling wage earners confront a sad irony: a nation originally dedicated to dissolving ancient European class distinctions is now being driven backward into another feudal age.

America should be undergoing a profound crisis of conscience. Instead, this is a time of great silence.

Hotel Rwanda

Var að horfa á afar góða mynd, Hotel Rwanda, og las í kjölfarið þessa grein um ástandið í Darfur, þar sem því er lýst hvernig þúsundum hefur verið slátrað og milljónir eru í lífshættu vegna yfirvofandi hungursneyða og ofbeldis.

Við lok greinarinnar er maður rifinn all harkalega aftur inn í sinn verndaða vestræna raunveruleika, með auglýsingu, sem spyr hvort manni finnist maður vera að borga of mikið fyrir líftrygginguna sína.

Týpískt.

Er fjölbreytileiki lífsins reglubundinn?

Fossil Records Show Biodiversity Comes And Goes

A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil records of marine animals over the past 542 million years has yielded a stunning surprise. Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation. The analysis, performed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, has withstood thorough testing so that confidence in the results is above 99-percent.

...

Muller and Rohde have been working on this study for nearly two years, and first discovered the 62 million year biodiversity cycle in November, 2003. They spent the next year trying to either knock it down or explain it. Despite examining 14 possible geophysical and astronomical causes of the cycles, no clear explanation emerged.

...

In examining their results, Muller and Rohde found that the fossil diversity cycle is most evident when only short-lived genera (those that survived less than 45 million years) are considered. They also found that some organisms seem to be immune to the cycle, while others are exceptionally sensitive. For example, corals, sponges, arthropods and trilobites follow the cycle, but fish, squid and snails do not. In general, longer-lived genera that are more diverse and widespread stand a better chance of resisting the 62 million year cycle.

$100 ferðavélar fyrir börn þriðja heimsins

MIT developing $100 laptops for children

...

Negroponte and some MIT colleagues are hard at work on a project they hope will brighten the lives and prospects of hundreds of millions of developing world kids.

It's a grand idea and a daunting challenge: to create rugged, Internet- and multimedia-capable laptop computers at a cost of $100 apiece.

...

The mission: to make laptops as ubiquitous as cell phones in technology-deprived regions. Negroponte's pitch: The cost of a laptop comes in far lower than a child's textbook expenses for the computer's lifespan.

...

Details are still being worked out, but here's the MIT team's current recipe: Put the laptop on a software diet; use the freely distributed Linux operating system; design a battery capable of being recharged with a hand crank; and use newly developed "electronic ink" or a novel rear-projected image display with a 12-inch screen.

Then, give it Wi-Fi access, and add USB ports to hook up peripheral devices.

Most importantly, take profits, sales costs and marketing expenses out of the picture.

Gott mál.

Scientific American gefst upp

Okay, We Give Up
From the April 2005 Issue of Scientific American.

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.

Okay, We Give Up

MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

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