This would be so very cool:
Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn’s Moons?
NASA is holding a press conference on Thursday “to discuss an astrobiology finding.” Are they going to announce that they’ve found evidence of extraterrestrial life?Blogger Jason Kottke took a look at NASA’s press release, which touts “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life” (astrobiology, besides being a cool word, is “the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe”), and decided to investigate further by looking at the participants’ resumes. So who are the participants?
- A geobiologist who’s written about “geology and life on Mars”;
- an oceanographer who’s done extensive work on arsenic-based photosynthesis;
- a biologist examining Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and its similarities to early Earth;
- and an ecologist investigating the “chemistry of environments where life evolves.”
Keep your fingers crossed.
Jim Downey
Hat tip to Jacob for the link! Thanks!
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Emergency, Predictions, Preparedness, Terrorism, Travel, YouTube
Gah. One of the things I kept seeing/hearing from those who support the TSA security procedures is that if you don’t like the groping or scans, just take a train or bus. When countered with the response that these procedures at the airports could be extended to train and bus stations, it’s common to hear the comment: “Nah, they’d *never* do that.”
Guess again:
Jim Downey
Via We Won’t Fly.
Filed under: Civil Rights, Emergency, Heinlein, movies, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Survival, Terrorism
By the time the dose of tempus was wearing off I had a picture of the United States in a shape that I had not imagined even when I was in Kansas City – a country undergoing Terror. Friend might shoot friend; wife denounce husband. Rumor of a titan could drum up a mob on any street, with Judge Lynch baying in the van. To rap on a door at night was to invite a blast through the door. Honest folk stayed home; at night the dogs were out.
The fact that most of the rumored discoveries of slugs were baseless made them no less dangerous. It was not exhibitionism which caused many people to prefer outright nudity to the tight and scanty clothing permitted under Schedule Sun Tan; even the skimpiest clothing invited a doubtful second look, a suspicion that might be decided too abruptly. The head-and-spine armor was never worn now; the slugs had faked it and used it almost at once.
That’s from Chapter XXIV of The Puppet Masters, the 1951 classic from Robert A. Heinlein.
It’s been a number of years since I last read the book – I think I read it prior to the release of the movie adaptation in 1994, but not since, so there were parts of the book which I didn’t remember. I had honestly forgotten that the alien invaders had come from Titan, for example – which is funny, since most of Communion of Dreams takes place there. And I forgot that Heinlein sets the book firmly in our current time – the first part of it is in July, 2007.
But what I hadn’t forgotten was the basic story line: alien invasion by quickly-reproducing “slugs” that can attach themselves to the human nervous system and completely control their hosts, using the full knowledge and abilities of those hosts. That made an impression on me when I first read the book in early adolescence. Scared the hell out of me.
What also made an impression was the above bit – the nudity. Hey, I was a hormone-soaked early teen. The idea of society quickly changing such that everyone would run around naked was . . . interesting.
When I re-read the book later (first semester of college at Grinnell – which so happened to be where the first bit of the book is set) and then again in advance of the movie, I just considered this bit to be part of Heinlein’s usual casual sexual tweaking of convention. It was no big deal, but I always just considered him of something of a ‘dirty old man’ who was looking for an excuse to get naked people into his books.
But now . . . well, I have to reconsider. He certainly nailed what people are like when frightened, and how that can have an impact on social mores. Consider my recent post about how willing some folks are to put up with the new security scanners and “enhanced pat downs,” and that’s just because of the *possibility* that these security procedures might make them marginally safer when flying. What if there was a massive threat which could be fought by shedding our clothes? People’d peel, and damned quickly.
So, Heinlein may indeed have just been something of a dirty old man. But he was also something of a prophet.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, Politics, Privacy, Science, tech, Terrorism
…to yesterday’s post, in which I focused primarily on the civil liberties aspect of the latest TSA security procedures.
I am not competent to evaluate the technical or engineering safety of the equipment being used for full-body scanning. But this guy is:
I am a biochemist working in the field of biophysics. Specifically, the lab I work in (as well as many others) has spent the better part of the last decade working on the molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer. The result of that work is that we now better understand that people who have a deficient BRCA2 gene are hypersensitive to DNA damage, which can be caused by a number of factors including: UV exposure, oxidative stress, improper chromosomal replication and segregation, and radiation exposure.
That’s the into to a post of his about the safety of one type of the new scanners. You should read the whole thing – it is well written for an intelligent lay person, though some of the technical stuff might be beyond your ken. It isn’t hyperbolic, but it is *very* sobering. Here’s the key paragraph which leapt out at me:
Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant’s testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!
This isn’t the only serious assessment of this technology which has been critical – in fact, he is largely writing in reaction to the government’s effort to discredit a letter of concern about the technology from a group of scientists and doctors at the University of California at San Francisco. I think the procedures should be changed based purely on civil liberties concerns, as I have written previously. But when you add in the technical concerns, I think the need to stop the use of these procedures becomes even more apparent.
Jim Downey
Via BB – which prompted me to take the time and go read the whole post, though I had seen references to it elsewhere previously.
No doubt, even if you don’t read my blog regularly and only pay minimal attention to the news, you’ve heard of the increasing aggravation and frustration over the new TSA security procedures. Even the President and Secretary of State have said that they find the procedures problematic:
WASHINGTON – Would Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton like to submit to one of those security pat-downs at airports?
“Not if I could avoid it. No. I mean who would?” she told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in an interview broadcast Sunday.
It’s bad enough that there are semi-organized efforts to jam the system on this Wednesday, expected to be the busiest day of the year for airports:
CHICAGO – As if air travel over the Thanksgiving holiday isn’t tough enough, it could be even worse this year: Airports could see even more disruptions because of a loosely organized Internet boycott of full-body scans.
Even if only a small percentage of passengers participate, experts say it could mean longer lines, bigger delays and hotter tempers.
But the procedures are “necessary”, as the head of the TSA just re-affirmed:
WASHINGTON – The head of the Transportation Security Administration on Sunday acknowledged that new full-body scanners and thorough pat-downs can be invasive and uncomfortable, but he said that the need to stay a step ahead of terrorists rules out changes in airport screening procedures.
John Pistole told CNN’s “State of the Union” that, despite the public uproar over new screening techniques, “we are not changing the policies” that he said were the best ways of keeping the traveling public safe. TSA screeners, he said, are “the last line of defense” in protecting air travelers.
* * *
“Clearly, if we are to detect terrorists who have proven innovative, creative in the design and implementation of bombs that are going to blow up airplanes and kill people, we have to do something to prevent that,” Pistole said.
Absolutely. Stopping terrorists from attacking our air travelers has to be placed above every other concern. But the new procedures won’t do that, as evil-doers could just conceal bomb components in their body cavities, as they have done before. No, this won’t suffice.
But there’s a simple, obvious solution which would eliminate the risk of any kind of terrorist destruction of airplanes: just stop people from flying. Shut down the whole system, within the US and incoming flights from other countries. That’s the only certain way to stop the attacks and thwart the diabolical plans of those who would want to harm us.
Jim Downey
There are over 150 posts here on my blog with the tag “Alzheimer’s.” That’s tens of thousands of words I have written about caring for Martha Sr and related issues. My co-author and I put together tens of thousands more into a book which we’re now trying to get published. And yet this short movie managed to convey what it is like to care for someone with a profound disability (which isn’t Alzheimer’s) and how that has an impact on everyone in the family:
Toby yearns for a life like any other eight-year-old kid. But his mentally disabled father is a constant reminder that life for Toby, will never be normal.
‘Water’ is a film about a young boy’s struggle to accept his fears, his mentally disabled father and his possible future duty.
It is an incredibly touching film, expertly done. Take the fifteen minutes or so and watch it. Though the description given doesn’t say so, I think you will find your life enriched and your day brightened in ways you will find surprising.
Jim Downey
Via MeFi.
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Failure, Government, Predictions, Privacy, Society, Travel
I haven’t written a lot about the most recent outrage over the “porno scanners” though it seems that my predictions almost a year ago are certainly coming true. And now the folks at Gizmodo have a nice addition to the mess:
One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans
At the heart of the controversy over “body scanners” is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.
A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that U.S. Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly-perhaps illegally-saved images of the scans of public servants and private citizens.
* * *
Yet the leaking of these photographs demonstrates the security limitations of not just this particular machine, but millimeter wave and x-ray backscatter body scanners operated by federal employees in our courthouses and by TSA officers in airports across the country. That we can see these images today almost guarantees that others will be seeing similar images in the future. If you’re lucky, it might even be a picture of you or your family.
Something to look forward to from our fine friends at the TSA.
Jim Downey
Sometimes hard work is more satisfying than other times:
That’s what I just did. It’s my form of getting even with the damned wood that just about killed me a year ago. Took two hours to split it all, using a maul and a star wedge. That’s not quite 5′ tall, about 10′ wide. And yeah, I hurt, and will probably hurt more later once I cool down.
But damn, that felt good.
Jim Downey
Filed under: YouTube
…to my post earlier, here’s this:
There’s a weird Zen quality to watching it.
Jim Downey