canival

For love, some would twist the laws of physics. Short of doing that, mantis shrimp communicate with the other sex by spinning light waves, biologists find. The feat seems to be unique to this animal.

Alone in the animal kingdom, mantis shrimp may use the physics phenomenon of circularly polarized light to signal their presence to—and to see—potential mates.

Light is made of electromagnetic waves. These are electric and magnetic fields that wiggle perpendicular to each other and to a light ray's direction. Many invertebrates have sophisticated eyes that can detect wavelengths of light invisible to humans. Some, including bees, can also distinguish linearly polarized light. That's when a light ray's electric field wiggles not in varying directions, but rather in one precise direction that forms a right angle to the ray.

Researchers now show that mantis shrimp—which actually look more like small lobsters—can tell when light is circularly, rather than linearly, polarized. That means that the electric field twists like a corkscrew as the light ray moves. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
The corkscrew can twist right or left—or, in biological terms, be right- or left-handed.

Roy Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that one species of mantis shrimp, Odontodactylus cultrifer, might be able to distinguish circular polarizations. Animals in this species, especially adult males, are rare. But 2 years ago, thanks to a tip from a crustacean enthusiast, Caldwell obtained a 4 inch-long adult male originally from Indonesia.

The shrimp had a fin with shades of red that looked more or less intense when seen through filters for right- or left-handed circular polarization. This trait was rare enough, but not unique in the animal kingdom. Caldwell's collaborators at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia also took a closer look at the eyes of O. cultrifer and of two similar species to see whether the animals could distinguish between right- and left-handed polarization.

The researchers found that some of the eyes' light-sensing cells doubled up as filters, explains Tom Cronin of UMBC. The cells have microscopic structures, like bristles of a toothbrush, that slightly slow light with electric fields parallel to the bristles, but not light with fields that are perpendicular. As a result, the twist of a circularly polarized wave will be flattened into a steady, linearly polarized wiggle, which another layer of sensory cells can then detect. Depending on their arrangement, bristled cells will select right- or left-handed polarization. This parsing enables mantis shrimp to distinguish the two types of light.

Meanwhile, the team trained mantis shrimp to feed from one of a few different tubes based on the circular polarization in the tubes' reflected light. Results appear online in Current Biology.

Caldwell says the skill, unknown in other animals, most likely helps the shrimp find mates. "It's the most private communication system imaginable," he says. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
"No other animal can see it."






























Hundreds of years ago in Japan, people offered thanks to the gods by sacrificing a horse or a pig. Horses and pigs, however, were valuable and expensive, so poor folks had a hard time expressing their gratitude. So they came up with a solution: Rather than sacrificing a horse, they would simply draw a painting of a horse on a wooden tablet and hang it in the temple.

Then someone, most likely an impoverished samurai, realized that horses and pigs were hardly the only thing that could be drawn on a tablet. He had the idea of painting something original, something beautiful, something creative. He offered mathematics.

This tablet was hung in the Kinshouzan shrine in the Gifu Prefecture in 1865. It shows 12 different geometric problems. The third problem from the right was presented by a 16-year-old girl.

Hundreds of beautifully painted, multi-colored wooden tablets showing problems and theorems of geometry have adorned Japanese temples. They are called "sangakus," which simply means mathematical tablets. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com/
The text on the tablets is written in an ancient form of Chinese, which was the language of scholars, much like Latin in the West. Only in the past couple of decades have these tablets been translated into modern languages in significant numbers.

A Japanese mathematics teacher, Hidetoshi Fukagawa, has been finding, translating, and researching the tablets. This spring, Fukagawa and Tony Rothman of Princeton University will publish a complete history of sangaku, including photographs of many sangakus that have never before been seen outside of Japan.

"Sangakus are exceptional," Rothman says. "They're not only exceptionally beautiful, but the problems are often exceptionally difficult. And the solutions can be very clever. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
Some of the things they do to solve these problems would never have occurred to me."

The sangakus were made during a period when Japan was mostly isolated from the outside world. The shogun leaders expelled all the foreign missionaries and forbade Japanese from leaving the country on pain of death in the early 1600s. The result was a kind of renaissance in Japan, with a flowering of unique cultural traditions like tea ceremonies, puppet theater, and woodblock prints.

At the same time, the shoguns persuaded the samurai warriors to lay down their weapons and become government functionaries. The pay, however, was low, so the samurai often moonlighted with other jobs. One of these outside jobs was to teach mathematics in the schools.


This tablet was created in 1814, but it was only discovered in 1994 when the temple it was in was about to be destroyed.

Isolated from the development of calculus taking place in the West, these mathematicians and their students created a kind of home-grown geometry with a uniquely Japanese character. Many of the problems were based on origami or folding fans, for example.

Here is an example of a sangaku problem. Take a circle and draw a polygon inside it, with each corner of the polygon on the circle. Choose one of the vertices of the polygon and connect lines from it to all the other vertices, dividing the polygon up into triangles. Within each one of those triangles, draw a circle that just touches each side of the triangle. The sum of the radii of those circles will be constant, no matter which vertex you chose.


One sangaku shows that the sum of the radii of the small circles in each of these drawings will be the same.

Most sangakus simply state the theorem and provide a diagram, but they don't provide a proof, and this one is no exception. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
The most straightforward way to prove it relies on Carnot's Theorem, which wasn't proven in the West until 100 years after the sangaku was created.

Rothman believes that sangakus were not just religious offerings, but "acts of bravado and challenges to other people to solve the problem." For example, one sangaku proclaims, "'This answer is correct to 15 decimal places,'" Rothman says. "It's kind of like, 'top that if you can!'"

Starting around 1800, several collections of sangaku problems were made into books, including the solutions, so researchers know the original methods for many of the problems. But a couple of sangakus are unsolved to this day. "One of them results in an equation of the 1024th degree," Rothman says. "A mathematician later got very famous for reducing it to a problem of the 10th degree, but that's still way too big to solve. We have no idea how they did it."


The Kaizu Tenma Shrine in the Shiga prefecture has a sangaku under the right eave which contains 30 problems. It's 10 inches high and 17 feet long.










A few years ago Avishai Dekel gave up chess in favor of mud wrestling. Dekel is a cosmologist and he isn't known to frequent strip clubs. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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But there are two types of cosmologists: those who study fundamentals, like the initial conditions and content of the early universe, and those who immerse themselves in the messier problem of galaxy evolution, replete with gas and stars that heat and cool, form jets, make black holes, and sometimes explode.


A computer simulation models how matter may accumulate into large-scale structures, the beginnings of galaxy formation. Illustrated is a patch of the cosmos 100 million light-years across. Yellow lines trace the flow and grouping of matter as it moves toward the red, or densest area, and away from the black, or least dense area.
Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge in England calls the two classes of cosmologists chess players and mud wrestlers. Cosmology is "a fundamental science just as particle physics is," says Rees. "The first million years [of the universe] is described by a few parameters ... but the cosmic environment of galaxies and clusters is now messy and complex."

Now that the chess players have established those basic parameters—such as the relative amounts of invisible dark matter, even-more mysterious dark energy, and ordinary matter—more cosmologists are turning to the mud. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/

Recent surveys of the shapes, colors, and masses of galaxies have put a new focus on the nitty-gritty of galaxy formation.

"Now that we know the cosmological parameters, it's really time to understand how galaxies form," says Dekel, of The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. To do that, "we have to trace the gas," not dark matter, because it's the gas that forms stars. "That's where the action is." The physics of gas interactions, or gastrophysics, is much more complicated than that of dark matter. Gas molecules respond to a host of forces while dark matter is simple to model because it responds predominantly to just one force: gravity. Nonetheless, says Dekel, he is a recent convert to gastrophysics.


Through the 1980s and 1990s, Dekel spent most of his time trying to estimate the density of matter in the universe by mapping the velocities at which galaxies and matter move through the vast invisible reaches of dark matter. Although no one knows what dark matter is made of, it appears to constitute 85 percent of the mass of the universe. And simply because there's so much of it, the stuff provides the gravitational scaffolding that pulls together ordinary gas-electrons, protons, atoms, and the like—to make stars and galaxies. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com/The behavior of dark matter has thus been considered a reliable map for the path of galaxy formation.

Only a few narrow streams can penetrate through the hot medium to build a galactic disk at the center and form stars. The bigger the halo, the more likely it is to quench star formation because of such heating..

Every galaxy is nestled within a halo of cold dark matter, composed of exotic particles that move much slower than the speed of light. (This relatively slow pace is why this dark matter is dubbed "cold.")

The halos start out small but continually merge to grow bigger, dictating that all structure in the universe should evolve in the same way, from little to big. The growing clumps of dark matter form the backbone of a cosmic web, with clusters and superclusters of galaxies falling into place along the densest filaments, like paint onto a dark canvas. On the largest scales in the universe, dark matter accounts amazingly well for galactic structure—where and how galaxies concentrate, says Piero Madau of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But in 2003, Dekel and others became intrigued by a finding about galaxies that dark matter alone could not explain. Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the modern-day universe consists mainly of two galaxy types—young-looking, disk-shaped spirals like the Milky Way, and elderly, football-shaped ellipticals. Ellipticals have a reddish tinge—an indication that they are old and finished forming stars long ago—while spirals have a bluish tinge, a sign of recent star formation.

A few years ago, researchers found that in the universe today, these two populations divide sharply by weight (SN: 5/31/03, p. 341). An analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has recorded about 1 million nearby galaxies of the northern sky, revealed that the "red and dead" ellipticals nearly always tip the scales at masses greater than the Milky Way, while the star-forming spirals fall below that weight. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/

Somehow, star birth was systematically and dramatically quenched in the big guys but proceeded unimpeded in the spiral small-fry.

The puzzle deepened in 2005 when Sandy Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues announced that they found the same galactic dichotomy when the universe was 7 billion years old, half its current age. Faber's team used a spectrometer she designed for the Keck Observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea to measure the mass of distant galaxies, part of a survey of what composed the universe at 7 billion years. She reviewed the results of the survey, known as Deep-2, at the January meeting in Austin, Texas, of the American Astronomical Society.

At first glance, the dichotomy would seem to conflict with cold dark matter theory. A preponderance of "red and dead" massive galaxies early in the universe might indicate that halos can start out as giants and then break apart into smaller bodies, the opposite trend of what dark matter would produce.

Dekel and his colleagues, including Yuval Birnboim, now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Mass., have an explanation that would fit with cold dark matter theory, but it requires combining gastrophysics with dark matter.

Gas pulled inside a dark-matter halo would normally fall into the center, where it would cool and grow dense enough to make stars. But as the universe ages, dark-matter halos merge and grow more massive, some becoming greater than about a trillion times the mass of the sun.

When a halo reaches this critical value, the stage is set for a galactic divide, according to Birnboim and Dekel. Their calculations and simulations show that the infalling gas rams into the relatively cold, stationary gas already at the halo's center. The collision creates a long-lasting shock that heats the cold gas, causing it to exert a pressure. That pressure pushes on infalling gas, hurling the material back to the halo's outskirts, where it remains like some exile in galactic Siberia, unable to coalesce and make stars. As long as the material in the central part of the halo maintains its outward pressure, the supply of fresh gas is choked off, and the galaxy can no longer make stars. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/

Louis J. Sheehan
Over time, the massive galaxy growing inside the halo's center, once a hotbed of star birth, becomes red and dead.

Halos that remain less massive—and which therefore beget smaller galaxies—can't forge such long-lasting shocks. Gas continues to stream unimpeded into the central region, enabling the birth of new generations of stars.

Simulations from several other groups, including those led by Dusan Keres, now at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Darren Croton, now at the University of California, Berkeley; Richard Bower of Durham University in England; and Andrea Cattaneo, now at the University of Potsdam in Germany, have come up with similar findings.

"The idea is that big, central galaxies are quenched before [the universe is 7 billion years old] because they are in massive halos ... while smaller galaxies are quenched later, if at all, when their parent halos reach the critical mass," says Dekel.


One remaining puzzle, notes Dekel, is how gas within the center of a massive halo can maintain, for up to 10 billion years of cosmic history, the outward pressure that keeps new gas at bay in the outer halo. He calculates that the pressure might last for only one-tenth that time. Some other source must keep star birth from turning back on.


YOUNG AND OLD. The young spiral galaxy NGC 300, located about 7 million light-years from Earth, is brimming with newborn stars in this combined ultraviolet- and visible-light snapshot. In contrast, the more mature elliptical galaxy NGC 1312, some 62 million light-years distant, is more quiescent.

Again delving into gastrophysics, he and other researchers point to the unusual role that black holes may play in staving off star birth in massive galaxies. Researchers now believe that every massive galaxy houses a central, heavyweight black hole, and that these gravitational monsters wield influence far beyond their immediate surroundings.

Packing the equivalent of millions to billions of suns into a volume no bigger than our solar system, black holes don't just pull matter in. Energy from the gas and stars spiraling into the hole also creates jets of matter that blast back out a million light-years from the center. In this way, a black hole could act to regulate or even switch off star formation, Dekel says.

Moreover, researchers have found that black holes at galactic centers grow in lockstep with the mass of stars in that galaxy's hub: The holes always seem to be one five-hundredth the mass of those stars. That prescription means that the most massive galaxies house the heaviest black holes—exactly the ones that are most likely to have jets strong enough to interrupt star formation.

"What's truly amazing is how tight the correlation seems to be" between the mass of a central black hole and a surrounding galaxy, says Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "I don't think prior to 10 years ago you would have found one astronomer in one thousand that thought black holes had some fundamental part in the formation of galaxies. We still don't know whether a black hole dictates the formation of a galaxy or the other way around."

Dekel and Birnboim, along with Jerry Ostriker of Princeton University, recently began entertaining the idea that black holes might not be needed to explain the galactic divide after all. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/
http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/According to their calculations, the heat produced by gas falling into the centers of massive dark-matter halos might be enough to quench the supply of cold, star-forming gas.


A new study goes further back in time than ever before to probe the difference between galaxy types.

Using distant quasars as searchlights, a team led by Art Wolfe of the University of California, San Diego, says its search may have reached back to the era when massive galaxies were still forming stars, before the death knell sounded for these heavyweights.

WELCOME TO THE WEB. The varying density of gas is related to the evolution of structure in the universe and the formation of galaxies. Gas density is shown (increasing with brightness) along with temperature (increasing from blue to red in color). Yellow circles indicate black holes (higher masses indicated by longer diameters). The left image models the universe at about 450 million years after the Big Bang. The early universe still shows a relatively uniform structure. At about 6 billion years (right), the universe has many black holes and a more filamentary structure.

During their 5-year study, Wolfe and his colleagues, including Jason Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz, used spectrometers at the Keck Observatory to study star formation in 143 dense gas clouds, each pierced by radiation from a different quasar. Astronomers generally agree that these clouds, known as damped Lyman-alpha systems, are the likely predecessors of modern-day galaxies. They reveal what those galaxies were like when the universe was only about 2 billion years old.

To assess the star-formation rate in the clouds, the team homed in on the abundance of carbon atoms stripped of a single electron. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
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Newborn stars readily excite these carbon ions. The higher their abundance, the higher the star formation rate.

The team used spectra of another ion, silicon stripped of one electron, to indicate the masses of the dark-matter halos in which the dense clouds reside.

To the surprise of the researchers, the study revealed that star birth was highest in those clouds that lie within the heaviest dark-matter halos. Those clouds are the likely progenitors of the most massive galaxies today, the team says in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal.

That scenario contrasts with the current universe, "where [massive galaxies] exhibit little, if any, star formation," says Wolfe. "But that's just what the Dekel-Birnboim model predicts. That far back [in time], the high-mass galaxies are still forming stars at a high rate." Moreover, observations of distant galaxies by several researchers, including Chuck Steidel of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, also show that star formation once proceeded at a feverish rate in massive galaxies.

"We go back far enough to see the star-forming phase of the high-mass systems," says Wolfe. It's only later, he notes, that star birth shuts down in the high-mass systems, a victim of overheated gas and possible interference by monster black holes.

Dekel, in the meantime, says he hasn't entirely abandoned his interest in investigating the fundamental properties of the universe. It's just that the evolution of galaxies provides such a messy, and thus intriguing, canvas for testing his ideas. "I see myself as a chess player who has waded into the mud," he notes. "And that's where all the fun is."







Modern genetics produced a paradox: The more we learn how much DNA we share, the more we are intrigued by the minor biochemical variations that set us each apart -- and with good reason.

Tiny differences in genes we have in common make some of us more vulnerable to breast cancer, alcoholism or infections, researchers recently reported. Other variations in genes we share make some of us more resistant to chemotherapy or treatments for heart disease and hypertension.

Any one of 11 variations in a single gene, for another example, can make it harder for commonly prescribed antidepressants to temper our moods, researchers at Munich's Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry reported in January in Neuron. Any one of nine variations in another gene may double the risk of lupus, University of Alabama scientists said.

Many of these fractional hereditary distinctions are random effects of chance at play. (Any two people are more than 99% the same at the genetic level.) http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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Broadly speaking, they also arise from the ancient history recorded in the genetic autobiography that we carry in our cells, coded there in billions of characters of DNA. The human genome is a biomedical narrative of migration, disease, conquest and trade. It has been accumulating plot twists and changes since small clans first moved out of East Africa to settle the world tens of thousands of years ago.

In the most detailed look yet at global human variation, two independent research teams -- one led by scientists at Stanford University and the other by scientists at the University of Michigan -- recently analyzed more than half a million genetic markers across hundreds of people from 51 ethnic groups on five continents. Melding medical genetics and population genomics, they probed kinship, diversity and the underpinnings of disease. "We are tying together what we know about human history with what we see in the human genome," said University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending.

New research in that effort reveals, for example, that Americans of European descent carry more potentially harmful genetic variations than do African-Americans, Cornell University computational biologist Carlos Bustamante and his colleagues reported last month in Nature.

The researchers concluded that this pattern of variation was the legacy of humanity's first forays into prehistoric Europe, when the venturesome probably numbered a few thousand or less. The hereditary flaws carried by these forebears then became widespread as their descendants expanded into a population of millions.

This year, new studies of human genetic variation around the world have produced genome data nearly 100 times more detailed than previous global assessments, yielding insights into how humanity's early migrations out of Africa affect us all today.
In Nature, researchers at the University of Michigan last month reported their analysis of more than 500,000 DNA markers occurring across 29 populations on five continents.
In Science, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine reported last month on 650,000 genetic markers measured across 51 population groups worldwide. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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The effect of migration from Africa to Europe can still be seen in the genes of Europeans today, Cornell University researchers reported last month in Nature.
Differences in gene expression between Europeans and Africans affects responses to medications and to infections, University of Chicago researchers reported earlier this month in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
In January, scientists in England, China and the U.S. launched the 1,000 Genomes Project to seek more detailed information about human genetic variation by sequencing the genomes of at least 1,000 people around the world.

Dr. Bustamante compared 10,000 genes shared by 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans and found nearly 40,000 individual differences in which a gene's smallest structural unit -- a single DNA base pair -- had been altered. Half of them had no measurable effect. Everyone harbors some potentially harmful variations, but, overall, the European-Americans had a higher percentage of those that could be deleterious.

"You cannot say anything at the individual level on the basis of this data," Dr. Bustamante cautioned. "No one person's genome is any healthier or better or more fit in an evolutionary sense than any other individual's."

Hundreds of genes also behave slightly differently in families of European descent than they do in families of African ancestry, especially those genes involved in producing antibodies and other fundamental cell functions, University of Chicago medical researchers reported this month in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The Chicago scientists analyzed gene variations to learn why some people are more sensitive than others to the toxic side effects of chemotherapy. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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They compared 9,156 genes in 30 Caucasian families in Utah with those in 30 Yoruban families from Ibadan, Nigeria.

All told, they found that 156 shared genes were more active among those of European heritage, while 254 other shared genes were more active among those of African ancestry. No one knows yet what, if anything, the minor variations in levels of gene activity mean medically or if they affect chemotherapy, said Chicago pharmaco-genomics expert Eileen Dolan.

In each instance, "we are comparing the same exact gene in both populations," she said. "The differences are subtle, not dramatic."

To delve even more deeply into human variation, scientists in the U.S., England and China in January launched a $50 million effort to catalog in exhaustive detail the DNA of at least a thousand people from around the world. They expect the 1000 Genomes Project, as they call it, to produce 60 times as much genetic sequence data in three years than has been released in all of the last quarter century.

Researchers hope it may help them tailor more effective medical treatments.

Human variation, however, may be more than medicine can easily master. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that even crucial genetic mutations in cancer cells, for example, may be different in every patient.



















Within hours of President Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, the CIA had established that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged killer, had met with Cuban officials at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City eight weeks before. The CIA had also established that, four weeks after the meeting, Havana had approved a visa for Oswald, even though it normally did not grant visas to American citizens. At the time, Oswald was working under the alias "O.H. Lee" at the Texas Book Depository in Dallas.

Such facts obviously point toward the sinister possibility of foreign involvement in the Kennedy assassination -- Cuban involvement. That two CIA sources independently reported seeing a Cuban official giving money to Oswald at Cuba's embassy in Mexico City only adds force to the possibility. And Fidel Castro himself had said, in the summer of 1963, that if American leaders continued "aiding plans to eliminate Cuban leaders . . . they themselves will not be safe." As CIA officials knew, such U.S. "plans" -- i.e., the CIA's efforts to assassinate Castro -- had continued up to the day of the Kennedy assassination.

So when the Mexican federal police, after the Kennedy assassination, arrested a female employee of the Cuban Consulate who had been in contact with Oswald, the CIA suggested that the Mexicans hold her incommunicado. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com/
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The agency also suggested that they ask her such questions as: "Was the assassination of President Kennedy planned by Fidel Castro . . . and were the final details worked out inside the Cuban Embassy?" Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, alerted Washington that there might be an indictable case against Cuban officials.

Little wonder, then, that the Warren Commission -- put together within days of Kennedy's death to investigate the assassination -- asked the CIA to provide it with everything the agency had regarding Oswald's activities in Mexico. The commission dispatched its top staff members to Mexico to meet with Ambassador Mann and Winston Scott, the CIA's station chief there. But nothing ever came of this Cuban connection. As we know, the Warren Commision, in its final report, determined that Oswald acted alone. What happened?

For one thing, the CIA had changed its tune by the time the Warren Commission staff members got to Mexico. The agency now claimed that it had learned of Oswald's activities in Mexico long after the assassination, by way of the FBI, and that stories about a Cuban official giving money to Oswald did not hold up. The Warren Commission concluded that there was no credible evidence of Cuban involvement.

Years later, thanks to congressional investigations, it emerged that the CIA had not been forthcoming with the Warren Commission about what it knew of Oswald's Mexican activities. Jefferson Morley's "Our Man in Mexico" brilliantly explores the mystery of this reticence. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
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Though Mr. Morley is a dogged investigative reporter, he has not discovered any jaw-dropping evidence that will change forever the way we think about the Kennedy assassination, but he uncovers enough new material, and theorizes with such verve, that "Our Man in Mexico" will go down as one of the more provocative titles in the ever-growing library of Kennedy-assassination studies.

The book begins as a straightforward biography of Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City in the early 1960s. It is an enthralling account of Scott's career as one of America's most accomplished spy masters. Mr. Morley memorably depicts not only Scott's espionage exploits, from London in World War II to Mexico City at the height of the Cold War, but also his complicated love life and his ambitions as a poet.

"Our Man in Mexico" moves onto murkier ground as it explores Oswald's movements in Mexico City during Scott's tenure there. But Mr. Morley has succeeded in ferreting out a wealth of CIA documents that reveal lapses, misreporting and destroyed evidence. He maintains that the CIA once possessed photographs of Oswald entering the Cuban Embassy and audiotapes of wiretaps that picked up Oswald's conversations with Cuban officials. The evidence is missing, he says; in fact, the disappearance of so much material has led him to conclude that Scott "perpetrated a wide-ranging coverup of CIA operations around Oswald." But why would Scott have done it?

Mr. Morley advances the theory that the CIA had to cover up an "operation" of its own that employed Oswald. While that theory might explain the holes in the record he encountered, Mr. Morley offers no evidence that such an operation ever existed. Instead he resorts to dredging up the "tantalizing" outline for a proposed novel by an ex-CIA officer in which a character working for the CIA recruits Oswald to assassinate Castro. Using fiction to make a factual argument is dubious enough, but what makes this exercise particularly absurd is the identity of the aspiring novelist: David Atlee Phillips, who testified repeatedly under oath to Congress that he did not know of any CIA plots involving Oswald.

There are, of course, more mundane explanations for the gaps in the CIA's surveillance of Oswald. Consider, for example, the agency's inability to produce photographs of Oswald entering the Cuban diplomatic compound in late September 1963, when eyewitnesses attested to his presence there. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
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Mr. Morley shows that if Oswald used the public entrance to the embassy, he almost certainly would have been photographed by the CIA. So he concludes the CIA hid the evidence.

But what if Oswald had entered through the embassy's back garage, which was not covered by the CIA camera? As it turns out, two other investigators, Wilfried Huismann and Gus Russo, researching for their documentary "Rendezvous With Death," tracked down the guard who was on duty at the garage back then. He recalled seeing Oswald in the garage, explaining that he would have noted the outsider's presence since Oswald was accompanied by a Cuban intelligence officer.

Winston Scott was naturally aware that the CIA's surveillance cameras could be avoided by using the embassy's nonpublic entrances. After the assassination, why didn't he investigate the reasons behind such limited observation of the site at a time when Oswald was being tracked? My own guess is that Scott realized that a consensus had been reached in Washington according to which Oswald had acted alone, without foreign assistance; in short, there was no need to pursue that avenue of inquiry. He probably also realized that opening up the Cuban angle would lead to embarrassing revelations about the CIA's earlier operations against Castro. In other words, he acted like a bureaucrat by protecting the government's secrets.

As with so many of the tangents in the history of the Kennedy assassination, the record of Oswald's activities in Mexico City is so spotty that we likely will never know what really happened there and can only speculate. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Scott supposedly wrote a memoir in which he refuted the Warren Commission's conclusions. But shortly after he died in 1971, the manuscript disappeared -- at the instruction, Mr. Morley suggests, of CIA Director Richard Helms. Maybe it will surface one day.





Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon still lies comatose at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer where he remains hospitalized. Tuesday marks the former leader's 80th birthday, and his family plans to mark the day with a symbolic token gift, but little more.



Aside from Sharon’s failing health, the Sharon family finds itself hit with more bad news on the former prime minister’s birthday.


Last week, the Jerusalem Supreme Court denied an appeal by former Knesset Member Omri Sharon, son of the former prime minister, thus not overturning his 2006 conviction for falsifying corporate records and campaign financing offenses.



Sharon is to start serving his seven-month prison sentences for these offenses this week, as well as paying a NIS 300,000 (about $80,000) fine.



Ariel Sharon was hospitalized on January 4, 2006, following a major stroke, and has remained in a coma ever since.



First signs of medical trouble already appeared in December 2006 , when Sharon suffered a minor stroke and was rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem. The former prime minister was hospitalized and kept for testing for several days.


Sharon’s doctors held a press conference several days later, in which they announced that tests revealed that the former prime minister had a congenital heart defect that was the likely reason for his stroke. Sharon was to undergo angioplasty several weeks later, but insisted on going home to recuperate in his Sycamore Ranch home in southern Israel instead of staying for observation at the Jerusalem hospital.


The angioplasty on the former PM was scheduled for January 5, 2006. A few days beforehand, however, Sharon felt ill and was rushed to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem once again. This, even though Soroka University Medical Center in Be'er Sheva was closer to Sharon’s southern Israel home. Aides reasoned that the Jerusalem hospital was more familiar with Sharon’s medical history, and could better care for him.


Sharon was rushed into surgery at the Jerusalem hospital following a massive bleed into his brain. Surgeons worked tirelessly for seven whole hours to repair the bleed, and save the former prime minister’s life. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Sharon had to undergo two additional surgeries and numerous CT scans, but ultimately his condition stabilized. He never regained consciousness, and despite doctor’s efforts to awaken his gradually, remained comatose.



In February 2006, Sharon experienced further health woes, and had to undergo four hours of surgery to repair an ischemic bowel.



Five months after his debilitating stroke he was transferred to the respiratory rehabilitation unit at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where he will spend his 80th birthday.








Comic books have never really been respected as an art form by the general public.

That being said, it might nevertheless surprise some folks to know that there was a time when comics were seen not only as kiddie fare but as harmful, vile, mind-alteringly dangerous kiddie fare.

That history is recounted in David Hajdu's excellent new book, "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America." http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Hajdu provides a captivating, insightful and detailed look at how American parents in the 1950s became convinced that the crime, horror and romance comics their kids were devouring would turn them into sociopaths.

He builds his history slowly, taking readers through a basic history of how the medium took shape in America and describing how artists such as Charles Biro and publishers such as EC's Bill Gaines saw a way to sell books by offering lurid, pulpy stories of criminals, killers, vampires and other monsters.

Parents, psychiatrists and other do-gooders, led by one Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose book "Seduction of the Innocent" accused the industry of being little more than Nazis, feared such material would lead to antisocial behavior.

They began a pogrom of attacks in the media, attempts at censorship through legislation and book burnings in towns, all of which Hajdu recounts with flair.

While Hajdu makes it clear what side he's on, he nevertheless is careful not to portray the comics industry as being rife with innocents.

He chastises certain people for their naivete and greed, not to mention disregard for seeing their books as anything other than product.

It all came to a somewhat literal head during a congressional hearing in which Gaines, high on diet pills, was asked whether a cover depicting a severed woman's head could be in "good taste," Hajdu said.

His answer inadvertently led to the Comics Code, a self-policing organization that proceeded to violently neuter every book on the stands.

Comics quickly lost whatever cultural cache they had and more than 800 talented people lost their jobs as companies folded.

Only Gaines managed to salvage through, taking his humor comic, Mad, and turning it into a 25-cent magazine that still thumbs its nose at popular culture today.

Hajdu's central conceit is that the comic book was the opening salvo in baby boomer culture wars. He makes a strong point.

The kids who read "Crime Does Not Pay," after all, would go on to discover rock 'n' roll, grow out their hair and protest the Vietnam War.

And yet this sort of cultural battle has occurred throughout history.

People freaked out about the waltz, for example, when it was introduced in the 18th century, calling it vulgar and sinful.

To those who think such censorship scares could never happen in today's enlightened times, I only ask you to consider the pillorying video games receive today from such upstanding moral folk as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman.

'Comic Book Comics':

If you prefer to have your comic book history told in a more ... well, comic book fashion, then perhaps you should pick up a copy of the oddly titled "Comic Book Comics."

Having explored the lives of deep thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kant in their previous series, "Action Philosophers," writer Fred van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey decided to take on the convoluted and at times controversial history of the comics industry.

"We realized we couldn't keep ["Philosophers"] going on forever. We were running out of thinkers," van Lente said during a recent interview. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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"The one thing we could be certain all comic fans like are comics."

"Comics" takes a more linear approach than "Philosophers," starting with the appearance of the Yellow Kid in newspaper pages in 1896, then hurtling forward to the birth of the comic book and animated cartoon while touching on important figures such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Walt Disney and Max Fleischer.

There won't be any resting on laurels however.













Holy Haleakala! Yesterday, a gamma-ray burst went off that was so bright that had you been looking at the right spot in the sky you could have seen it with just your own eyes!

It’s difficult to put this into the proper context. GRBs are monumental explosions, the exploding of a massive star where most of the energy of the catastrophe is channeled into twin beams of energy. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
These beams scream out from the explosion like cosmic blowtorches, and for thousands of light years anything they touch is destroyed. Happily for us, GRBs always appear hundreds of millions or billions of light years away.
Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.
The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.
In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.
There is, quite simply, no way to exaggerate the devastation of a gamma-ray burst.
Yet for all that, they are optically faint due to their terrible distance. At billions of light years away, even the Universe’s second biggest bangs are difficult to see.
So that’s what makes GRB 080319B (the second GRB seen on 2008 March 19) so incredible: distance measurements put it at 7.5 billion light years away, yet it was visible to the unaided eye had you just happened to be looking up at the sky at that moment.
Whoa.
This is the single brightest GRB ever seen in optical light, so as you can imagine reports are pouring in from observatories all over the world right now. Anything this bright must be extraordinary, and you can bet that astronomers will be falling over themselves to observe this incredible event. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
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We still don’t know enough about GRBS; just what mechanisms focus those beams? We know black holes are at their core, powering these events, but how do the gravity and magnetic fields come together to generate forces like this? How tightly focused are the beams? Do they open at a one degree angle? 5? 10? Why does every GRB behave somewhat differently, with some lasting for seconds and others for minutes?
And why was this one so frakkin’ bright? Was it a more energetic explosion itself, or were we, by coincidence, looking precisely down the center of the beam? If the beam of a GRB is pointed ever-so-slightly away from us, so that the edge nicks us, the GRB will look fainter. By staring down the throat of a GRB we’d see it as bright as it could possibly be. Maybe GRB080319B had us dead in its sights.
Watching the extremes of GRB behavior can help us constrain the more normal aspects of them… if you can even use the word "normal" when it comes to such titanic explosions on these scales. There is a fascination we humans have with such terrible events, an atavistic thrill even when our puny brains can’t comprehend the size and scale of them.
If you want to know what my nightmares look like, then GRBs are a good place to start. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
I’m just glad there (most likely) aren’t any stars nearby that can do this. I like GRBs… when they’re far, far away.


A startling result from the Cassini mission has just been announced: Titan, Saturn’s giant moon, may have an ocean of water and ammonia under its surface.





The Cassini probe does more than return hauntingly beautiful images. It is equipped with a sort of radar that allows it to map the topographical features of Saturn’s moons. This allows scientists to make accurate studies of the moons’ surfaces, including that of Titan. This in turn gives scientists an excellent set of landmarks, allowing them to study physical characteristics of the moons, including their rotation period.
Titan’s period is well-studied, and Cassini has visited Titan many times. Astronomers used the known landmarks and rotation period of Titan to predict what they will see with each visit… and they found landmarks like lakes and mountains that were far afield of where they were expected, as much as 30 kilometers (19 miles). A solid body will rotate as such, making these features very predictable. If the landmarks weren’t where they should be, then it must mean that Titan isn’t a solid body.
The more detailed story is that the crust, the surface layer of the moon must be decoupled, separate, from the interior. The only way for that to be is for there to exist a liquid layer between the surface and the core. Titan is far too cold and is comprised of the wrong material to have a hot mantle like the Earth does. Instead, scientists think it has an ocean 100 km below its frozen surface. Given the composition of the surface and the known density of Titan, they suspect it is made of liquid water and ammonia. The crust floats over this chilly liquid, and as winds blow on the surface the crust drifts, causing the predictions of landmark locations to be off.
The surface of Titan is loaded with what we call simple organic molecules: ethane, methane, and more. It is shocking, to say the least, to consider what would happen when you mix liquid water and organic compounds. Could there be life swimming deep under the surface of that planet-sized moon?
At the moment — and for the foreseeable future — there is no way to know. The ocean, if it exists, has not yet been confirmed, so we don’t want to put the cart before the horse. A lot of hard work lies ahead for those who study this distant world — seasonal variations in the positions of Titan’s landmarks would indicate that it is indeed the atmosphere blowing over the surface that is changing the rotation of the crust itself, and that in turn would give much credence to the idea of an underground ocean.
If this does pan out, then we will have to add yet another object in our solar system to the short list of worlds where liquid water can and does exist. And given the near-certainty of liquid water below the surface of Enceladus, Saturn will be able to proudly claim at least two them.















Athletes who take human growth hormone may not be getting the boost they expected.

While growth hormone adds some muscle, it doesn't appear to improve strength or exercise capacity, according to a review of studies that tested the hormone in mostly athletic young men.

"It doesn't look like it helps, and there's a hint of evidence it may worsen athletic performance," said Hau Liu, of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., who was lead author of the review.
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Growth hormone, or HGH, is among the performance enhancers baseball stars Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte were accused of taking in Sen. George Mitchell's report. Mr. Clemens denies using the hormone, while Mr. Pettitte admits using it.

The new research has some limitations and sheds no light on long-term use of HGH. The scientists note their analysis included few studies that measured performance. The tests also probably don't reflect the dose and frequency practiced by athletes illegally using the hormone.

Dr. Liu and his colleagues at Stanford University sought to find out if growth hormone could improve performance. They looked for the best published tests, those comparing participants who got the hormone to those who didn't get the treatment.

They analyzed 27 studies involving 440 participants. The results were released yesterday by the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that those who got the hormone put on about five pounds more of muscle and lost about two pounds more of fat, although the fat loss wasn't statistically different. The researchers said some of the extra body mass could be fluid buildup.

There was no difference found in strength or exercise stamina between the two groups, but there were only two strength studies and eight that measured exercise.









These days, people really are taking coals to Newcastle.

That flow is part of a vast reorganization of the global coal trade that is making the United States a major exporter for the first time in years — and helping to drive up domestic prices of the one fossil fuel the nation has in abundance.

Coal has long been a cheap and plentiful fuel source for utilities and their customers, helping to keep American electric bills relatively low.

But rising worldwide demand is turning American coal into another hot global commodity, with domestic buyers having to compete with buyers from countries like Germany and Japan.

Environmental concerns have forced some American utilities to cut back on plans for coal-burning power plants.

Nonetheless, spot prices for two benchmark American grades of coal, from central Appalachia and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, have been rising, with occasional dips, since last spring.

They eased in recent days but are still up by 93 percent and 64 percent, respectively, in the last year, according to figures from Doyle Trading Consultants and Evolution Markets.

How high prices will go, and how quickly the increases will be passed along to electricity customers, remains to be seen.

American utility companies buy almost all their coal on long-term contracts, locking in prices for several years.

But as those contracts come up for renewal, price increases are likely, analysts said.

“Watch out, consumer,” said David M. Khani, a coal analyst at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx

“You’re probably going to see accelerating electricity prices in 2009, 2010 and 2011.”

Coal and utility executives predict that coal will remain the most economical fuel in years to come. But they concede that any significant rise could have an important inflationary impact since coal is used to produce about half the nation’s electric power, and coal is also vital in steel production.

For coal producers, the new demand abroad is good news at a time when coal is under political attack at home. More than 50 proposed coal-fired power plants were delayed or canceled over the last year because of concerns over greenhouse gas emissions.

“This export boom right now is the difference between slow growth in our markets and hyper-expansion in our markets,” said Gregory H. Boyce, chairman and chief executive of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company. “You have two billion-plus people looking for a better standard of living. The world is energy-short and the U.S. coal sector is beginning to fill that gap.”

Many environmental groups see the rising global trade as an ominous development, however, since it promises to confound efforts to limit global emissions. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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World consumption of coal has increased in recent years by more than 4 percent annually, a major reason that emissions of carbon dioxide are going up, not down. Carbon dioxide is the principal gas implicated in global warming.

“Any rise in coal use around the world is bad news for the environment,” said Alice McKeown, who works on coal issues for the Sierra Club. “The U.S. needs to be a leader on global warming, and increasing our coal exports is moving in the wrong direction.”

The United States will export 7 or 8 percent of its coal production this year, up from about 5 percent last year, industry leaders predicted in interviews. Because of higher prices, the value of coal exports should double, to $3.75 billion.

United States exports of coal grew from 49 million tons in 2006 to about nearly 59 million tons in 2007, according to coal industry statistics, while domestic production increased by 1 percent. Coal executives say they expect exports to reach 80 million tons this year, and with railroad and port improvements, to rise to as much as 120 million tons in the next few years.

“There’s no question that the incremental rise in exports this year has driven the prices up,” said Charles E. Zebula, senior vice president for fuel supply at American Electric Power, one of the country’s largest utilities.

Simultaneously, imports of coal are decreasing gradually as producers in Colombia and Venezuela turn to markets other than the United States for higher prices. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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The shifts are further tightening supplies of coal in the eastern United States, where stiffening regulations and various mine closings have limited output in recent years.

“U.S. coal producers are trying as much as possible to ship coal to the highest bidder, and in many cases that means Europe,” said Gordon Howald, a coal analyst at Calyon Securities. “The once-stodgy coal industry has become an exciting global commodity.”

Great Britain, the country that used its vast coal stocks to pioneer industrial development in the 18th century, has become a major coal importer in recent years, its own industry moribund. With Newcastle-upon-Tyne once being the center of a rich English coal region, the phrase “hauling coals to Newcastle” was a cliché describing an absurd economic proposition.

Nowadays, however, coal arrives regularly at the Port of Tyne from suppliers in the Baltic and South America. American coal goes to other English ports at rising rates; figures from the Commerce Department show that in 2007, United States steam coal exports to the United Kingdom increased by 53 percent and coking coal, used in steel-making, by 20 percent, compared to the previous year.

The boom in coal exports is partially linked to a falling dollar, which makes American coal cheaper on world markets. But there are deeper, longer-term reasons for the world to turn to the United States, which has 27 percent of the world’s coal reserves, more than any country.

As it continues a building spree for coal-fired power plants, China is consuming so much coal that its ability to export is diminishing rapidly; it is expected to become a net importer. Other exporters like South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam are cutting back for a variety of reasons, including growing domestic needs and local power shortages. Recent flooding in Australia has cut exports, at least temporarily, while an earthquake closed a major mine in Germany.

Meanwhile India is building huge coal plants that will require growing imports, while Russia is using more and more coal to make natural gas available for export.

As a result the pattern of world shipments for coal used for metallurgical and energy purposes is shifting. South Africa and other exporting nations that used to export to Europe are turning to Asia, where coal prices are higher, leaving European markets open for American exports. American coal is making its way to England, Spain, Japan and other countries that traditionally looked elsewhere.

The increase expected this year will make the United States a major global exporter for the first time since the early 1990s. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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For years, low-cost producers in Australia, China and other countries grabbed the bulk of the international coal trade. But now the United States is becoming a low-cost producer, in part because the euro and other currencies have gained so much value in relation to the dollar.

In the United States, plans to build new coal-fired plants are being shelved, and bankers are scrutinizing new projects because of uncertainties over future costs of carbon dioxide emissions. Both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates say they favor legislation to control global warming, which would presumably limit such emissions.

As the coal industry sees it, exports could be crucial if the American market starts to shrink. Coal executives are talking about upgrading mines, rail and port facilities to meet increasing world demand.

Just within the last couple of months, Peabody began sending coal from Wyoming to Europe, first by rail to the Mississippi River, then by vessel through the Gulf of Mexico. And for the first time in a decade, the company is shipping coal to Japan from the California coast.

“As U.S. coal demand is constrained because of increasing environmental regulation, coal production in the United States will increasingly go toward overseas buyers,” Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage and research firm, predicted.

The rise in coal prices has so far been invisible to most American consumers because price increases have yet to hit most utilities.

American Electric Power said it had contracted for more than 90 percent of its coal for 2008 before recent price increases. The company said it expects to spend 13 percent more for coal this year than last, after spending about 5 percent more in 2007 compared with 2006.

“We’re not going to see the spot market price in the customer’s bill today,” Mr. Zebula said. “But clearly the price of the good has gone up and will increase over time.”

Already, there are some signs of rising prices. Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power, both American Electric Power subsidiaries, on Feb. 29 filed papers seeking approval in West Virginia for a 17 percent increase in revenues, mainly to pay for costlier coal. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
If the request is approved, a residential customer using 1,000 kilowatt hours a month would see his bill increase from $64.55 to $73.94, starting in July.

Kenneth B. Medlock, an energy analyst at Rice University, predicted many more electricity consumers will begin to feel the coal price spike over the next year, particularly in states most dependent on coal, like Kentucky, Illinois and Ohio.

“Their power bill is going to go up, but it also will start to affect the prices of goods they buy at the grocery store,” he added.





The dispute over the “little people” of Flores continues, unabated.

The bones and a single skull of these “little people” are believed to be remains of a separate species of the human family that lived about 18,000 years ago on an island in Indonesia, as the scientists who made the sensational discovery concluded in 2004.

But persistent skeptics have contended in a recent flurry of scientific reports that they were nothing more than modern humans with unusually small bodies possibly malformed by genetic or pathological disorders. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
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Neither side is backing off in this sometimes bitter row, which intensified last week with the announcement of the discovery that in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, other abnormally small-bodied people had lived long ago. Their bones were found in two caves and described in the online journal PloS One.

Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues said the Palauan bones, representing at least 25 individuals, were from modern humans about four feet tall, close in size to some pygmies living in this region of the Pacific. Populations on isolated islands with limited resources often evolve short statures.

The Palauan specimens shared facial, chin and dental traits with the Flores people, the scientists said, but had larger braincases “possibly at the very low end or below that typically observed in modern, small-bodied humans.”

For these and other reasons, the scientists say, these Palauan people, who lived from 1,400 to 3,000 years ago, suggest the possibility that the Flores people were not a distinct species, designated Homo floresiensis, but “simply an island adapted population of Homo sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”

In previous reports and interviews, other skeptical scientists have contended that the extremely small brain size of the Flores people, close to that of a chimpanzee, was more likely a consequence of any number of growth disorders. Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian paleoanthropologist who was one of the first to examine the Flores bones, immediately suspected microcephaly, a genetic condition causing a small head.

This hypothesis has been argued back and forth, and last month an Australian scientist offered another possible explanation. The scientist, Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne, reported that an image of the base of the Flores skull showed evidence of an enlarged pituitary gland, suggesting the individual may have suffered from cretinism, which can cause stunted growth and a small brain.

The two principal scientists who advanced the separate-species thesis — Peter Brown, a paleoanthropologist, and Michael Morwood, an archaeologist, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia — have said they are unmoved by the criticism. And prominent experts on early humans have endorsed the new-species interpretation, including Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.

After the publication of Dr. Berger’s findings, Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, said, “Obviously the Flores material came as a bit of a surprise to many of us, but it was not a surprise that might not have been anticipated.”

Dr. Wood, who was not involved in the original research, said the one fairly complete Flores skeleton and other fragments have got “all sorts of intriguing morphology” that distinguishes the individuals from modern humans. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/

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He and a group of other scientists have prepared their own assessment in a report to be published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“All of these exotic explanations being proposed require the suspension of any fragment of common sense,” Dr. Wood said. “They are seeking a much more exotic explanation than the one for a distinct species that looks like an earlier Homo.”

Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University who has examined casts of the Flores braincase, disputed the microcephaly argument and the Berger paper.

In a study comparing the Flores specimen with known microcephalics, Dr. Falk and researchers at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University concluded three years ago that the ancient individual did not suffer such a disorder. Its wide brain and frontal lobes, she said, were not like the brains of microcephalics.

“Suites of features from head to feet set the Flores individuals apart from Homo sapiens, which is why this is a new species,” she said in an interview.

William L. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has worked closely with the Flores researchers, said in an e-mail message that the Berger paper “is really much ado about nothing,” adding that modern human pygmies of the size reported on Palau “are old news in this part of the world.”

Dr. Jungers said that none of these small-bodied humans “are as short as the various individuals of Homo floresiensis” or have similar limb proportions, cranial capacity, jaw anatomy, wrist bones and other characteristics.

The new-species proponents concede that they would have a stronger case if it rested on more than a single skeleton with a skull and assorted bones of about 12 other individuals.

Dr. Berger, whose research at Palau was supported by the National Geographic Society, emphasized in an interview, “I’m not on either side of this debate.” But he defended his report, which he said was preliminary yet based on substantial fieldwork and analysis, as a contribution to “the discussion of modern human variations that has been missing in the Flores debate.” These variations, he added, “occur with high frequency or we would not have found them so readily.”





In an extraordinary news conference on his first full day on the job, Gov. David A. Paterson acknowledged on Tuesday that he had had several extramarital relationships, including one with a state employee, but said he had done nothing illegal and had been faithful to his wife in recent years.

Mr. Paterson said he made the disclosure because he wanted to clear his conscience and avoid being blackmailed. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
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He said he hoped his openness about his past affairs would help him to gain the trust of New Yorkers and move forward to focus on governing.

“I didn’t want to be compromised, I didn’t want to be blackmailed, I didn’t want to hesitate taking an action because the person on the other end might hurt me or my family,” Mr. Paterson, a Democrat, said during the tense and often awkward appearance with his wife, Michelle Paige Paterson, at his side. “I just thought this was the time to come forward and reveal this.”

Mr. Paterson said no state funds had been used as he carried out his affairs. He said he may have used his campaign credit card for some expenses that he did not detail, but said, if so, he would have reimbursed his campaign for the spending.

Mr. Paterson’s revelation comes less than a week after Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a prostitute, resigned, and a former governor of New Jersey, James E. McGreevey, and his estranged wife publicly traded claims about the nature of their sex life together.

Mr. Paterson said he had asked Mr. Spitzer to delay the effective date of his resignation until Monday as he grappled with how much to disclose about his past infidelities.

“I didn’t know that I was even going to be here until last Wednesday,” he said, referring to the office of governor. “I put it back a few days to try and organize things, and this is one of the issues I just want to get straight with New York’s citizens so that they know who their governor is and that their governor takes this office seriously.”

The news conference capped an astonishing 24 hours that began with Ms. Paterson holding the Bible as her husband was sworn in before an ebullient audience of lawmakers in the Assembly chamber as dignitaries, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and prominent black politicians, looked on.

Just after the swearing-in, while Mr. Paterson’s supporters were still celebrating, the new administration was plunged into its first crisis, as a Daily News columnist inquired about a past affair and Mr. Paterson and his mostly untested advisers debated how to handle the matter.

The governor and his wife told the columnist that they had each strayed during the marriage, and then Ms. Paterson, an executive at the Health Insurance Plan of New York, canceled a morning appearance in Manhattan and came to the capital to meet the crush of reporters. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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While ordinary New Yorkers seemed startled by the emergence of another story of sexual infidelity, reaction to the revelations in Albany was generally supportive, in part because the new governor, a former state senator, has a deep reservoir of good will among lawmakers. It remains to be seen, however, how long Republicans will give him a honeymoon.

“This week has been a whirlwind,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I think what happened last week with Governor Spitzer was a terrible personal tragedy that then turned into a crisis for this state.”

Mr. Paterson’s revelations, he said, “make him stronger.”

“I think a lot of people admire his forthrightness and his honesty,” he added.

Senator Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader, said the Patersons’ marital problems were nobody’s business but their own, as he brushed off suggestions that the affair threatened to interfere with the state’s business.

Neither the governor nor his staff would specify when he stopped having the affairs, beyond saying several years ago.

“Several years ago, and there were a number of women,” Mr. Paterson said during the news conference.

He did not supervise the state employee with whom he had an affair, he said, and did nothing to further the woman’s career. Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paterson, said the state employee worked in the executive branch of the Spitzer administration and was considering whether to continue to work for the new administration.

Campaign finance records indicate that the Paterson campaign paid the woman $500 for work she did for his State Senate campaign several years ago.

It remains unclear if other complications lie ahead for Mr. Paterson.

The governor expressed uncertainty about whether he had used campaign funds to pay for hotel rooms for his assignations, but said he never would have knowingly done so.

Under state law, politicians are barred from using campaign funds for personal expenses. Mr. Paterson’s campaign filings showed a handful of payments over several years to a hotel on West 94th Street, not far from his home, that Mr. Paterson’s office has confirmed he used for an extramarital affair during that period. But he has also said his staff used the hotel on occasion. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx

It was not clear on Tuesday who had made use of the hotel rooms.

“I would never use campaign funds for that purpose,” Mr. Paterson said, but then added, “There have been a couple of questions about the campaign funds and I’ll have to check them out. There have been a few times when my credit card didn’t work, I used the campaign credit card and reimbursed it. But I never knowingly used campaign funds.”

While the governor dealt with the intensely personal issue, he also confronted a growing financial crisis. The State Division of Budget said on Tuesday that the nation was in recession, and Mr. Paterson moved late in the day to impose $800 million in new spending cuts, the third retrenchment made by the executive branch since it released its original budget in January and a sign of the precarious nature of the state’s finances. The governor likened it to “a fiscal challenge that we have not seen since the dark days following September 11.”

The governor’s mood was in marked contrast to his joking, effusive appearance in the Assembly chamber during his swearing-in, which included an impersonation of the Assembly speaker.

When he opened his press conference, the governor said: “I betrayed a commitment to my wife several years ago, and I do not feel I’ve betrayed my commitment to the citizens of New York State. I haven’t broken any laws, I don’t think I’ve violated my oath of office, and I saw this as a private matter.”

“This is something I think in a regular marriage we would have been wishing to go to our graves with,” he said, adding, “the reason that we disclosed the truth is so the citizens of New York State would know that when confronted with these questions, that we would be honest.”

Mr. Paterson said he had had affairs at a time when he “was jealous over Michelle” but later said he “didn’t take the actions because I was jealous; I was just trying to explain how I was feeling.”

“I’m not trying to blame anyone,” he added. “I’m not trying to say I was upset, so you can’t blame me. I was just pointing out that this happens to people.”

Mr. Paterson said that he and his wife had sought counseling and had since resolved their marital problems. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
For her part, Ms. Paterson said “the message I try to teach my children is that a marriage is going to have peaks and valleys, so you want to show them how to get through them and how to work through them, because no marriage is perfect.”



Researchers believe they have figured out why a genetic blood disorder found in the tropics protects against death from malaria.

The disease, alpha thalassemia, causes children to produce abnormally small red blood cells, often rendering them listless from mild anemia — a much smaller threat than malaria, which kills an estimated one million children a year.

Alpha thalassemia is common in tropical parts of Asia, Melanesia and the Mediterranean. The name means “sea blood,” and its connection to the Mediterranean Sea was known to the Greeks.

Parasitologists have known for 50 years that it protects against malaria. They speculated that it somehow blocked the malaria parasite from entering the cell.

But scientists at New York University’s medical school and Oxford University, studying 800 children in Papua New Guinea, found parasites in the blood cells of children with thalassemia.

Life-threatening anemia occurs in children only when their hemoglobin levels drop below 50 grams a liter, and children with thalassemia produce more red blood cells than average, with less hemoglobin per cell.

The scientists propose that this protects them because parasites destroy a smaller percentage of their blood cells.

“It is really remarkable and so simple,” said Karen Day, chairwoman of the department of medical parasitology at N.Y.U.




Population increases in many fast-growing counties, particularly in the South and West, started slowing last year, suggesting that the housing crunch may be forcing many Americans to stay put.

People "are paralyzed in their quest for jobs in growing areas in many parts of the country because the housing market has shut down across the board," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

The Census Bureau's annual estimate of county-population changes covers the 12 months that ended July 1, 2007. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
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It shows that many Americans continued moving to sunny counties in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, but that the rates were slowing.

The data show a marked deceleration in population growth in several suburban counties that are farthest from urban centers -- the kind of counties to which some city residents had flocked in prior years for bigger houses and a different lifestyle. At the same time, urban areas and close-in suburbs were seeing population decreases slow, and in some cases reverse.

"It's a year of a migration correction, just as there was a correction in the housing market," said Mr. Frey.

Americans continue to seek out the Sunbelt. The 10 counties with the largest population increases were all in California, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.

Maricopa County, Ariz., where Phoenix is located, had the biggest rise in population between July 2006 and July 2007, adding 102,000 people, tallying births, deaths and migration from inside and outside the U.S. That increase, though, was 30,000 fewer than the year before, mostly reflecting fewer people moving there from another county.

The slowdown of county-to-county movement pulled down expansion in other fast-growing counties. Population in California's Riverside County, which is east of Los Angeles, increased by 66,000 -- down from 80,000 between July 2005 and July 2006. In Texas's Harris County, where Houston is, the population increased by 60,000, less than half the gain between July 2005 and July 2006.

Some formerly highflying counties actually saw population fall. Broward County, Fla., part of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, added an average of 28,000 residents a year between 2000 and 2005. But the county lost 13,000 residents between July 2006 and July 2007. That was the county's first population decline recorded by the Census Bureau.

Some cities and suburbs that had been losing people to outer areas saw the exodus slow. Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, had lost an average of 16,000 a year between 2000 and 2006. Last year it gained about 4,800. In San Diego, the population rose by 27,000 in the latest period, compared with an average gain of 5,000 a year between 2003 and 2006.

"It's like the whole system [of migration] is kind of gearing down a little bit," said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute.

Movement from one part of the country to another often slows during economic weakness and sometimes spurs shifts. In the early 1980s, many people fled the industrial Midwest for Texas oil towns, then moved again when the boom ended. Earlier this decade, workers from tech firms in Northern California headed south after the late 1990s tech boom collapsed.

The housing market's woes, though, are working the other way. Demographers and headhunters suggest people may be staying put because they can't sell their homes or can't get financing for new ones.

Dru George, a partner at Austin McGregor, an executive search firm based in Dallas, said that in the past nine months he has had several executives turn down jobs in other places because of the financial hits they would take if they sold their homes. Some are "under water" -- that is, they paid more on their houses than they would get selling them -- he said.

"I'm doing a search in Austin, and I was speaking with candidates, East Coast, West Coast, in the South," he said. "A lot of these executives are $300,000 to $400,000 under water on their house. Do they sell it at a loss or stay put? That's something we see on a daily basis."

The data also show that some Gulf Coast counties, decimated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, are attracting new residents.

Two of the nation's fastest-growing counties, on a percentage basis, were in Louisiana. Orleans Parish, La., added 29,000 residents between July 2006 and 2007, after losing 243,000 residents in the year-earlier period. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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As the national divorce rate plateaus at historically high levels, many people yearn to understand what makes a successful marriage. This has given rise in recent years to an outpouring of confusing studies and surveys attempting to nail down the odds of particular types of couples staying together.
Which couples have the best chances? Depending on which study you believe -- they vary widely in quality -- you must get lots of education, earn a lot of money, marry over age 25, live in a Blue State, be white, or be a Presbyterian or a Catholic (but only a faithful one who attends Mass). What doesn't help: being a born-again Christian, having daughters instead of sons, having divorced parents or being born in Oklahoma. (Pilloried in the media a few years ago for its high divorce rate, Oklahoma has mounted a state-funded marriage-education program that has enrolled 133,000 people so far, an official says.)

As a child of divorced parents who has seen many friends divorce, Maggi Deroian, 29, who is single, wants a happy marriage. To that end, the New York event producer follows the research and makes "rules for my life, based on statistics, that would help minimize my chances for divorce," she says. What's frustrating, though, is that many of the studies focus on factors she can't control, such as family history or race. "Knowing that practicing Catholics who go to church have a lower divorce rate" doesn't help someone who's not one, she says.

Many people regularly see a doctor for an annual physical or visit the dentist for an annual cleaning. Now, clinicians at the Center for Couples and Family Research want people to undergo a regular marriage checkup. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
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This quiz was developed at the center, based at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., to help couples assess their marital health. Even the best marriages have strengths and weaknesses, and this checklist aims to help identify them. There's no "score" at the end, where couples discover if their marriage will fail or succeed. Instead, couples are encouraged to identify areas where they can improve their relationship. Take the assessment.
For more information, visit Clark University's Web site.

The research, adds Erin Stafford, 27, a Fullerton, Calif., image consultant who is also single, "just feeds the fires of insecurity."

After reviewing a stack of studies, I've extracted some findings that are generally helpful:

- Take life's big steps in mindful order. On average, 43% of first marriages end in separation or divorce within 15 years, a federal study shows. Marrying in your teens or having children out of wedlock are linked to higher rates. Odds improve when you graduate from college first; then marry, then have children. The divorce rate falls as the age of marriage rises through the late 20s, then levels off, says a new study by Evelyn Lehrer at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Be wary of casual cohabitation. Singles have been scared by studies linking cohabitation before marriage to divorce; however, people who live together are a self-selecting population who may place less value from the start on lifelong monogamy. In a more helpful insight, Scott Stanley at the University of Denver and others have found cohabitation can create an inertia effect -- a tendency for cohabiting couples who otherwise wouldn't marry to slide into marriages of convenience that later hit the rocks. Couples who wait to live together until after they're engaged tend to avoid comparable problems.

Find a supportive workplace. While blacks tend to divorce at higher rates than whites, Jay Teachman at Western Washington University has found the divorce gap vanishes among couples in the Army, one of the nation's most race-blind institutions. In the Army, blacks tend to be fairly paid and promoted -- and to divorce at the same rate as white civilians. Given the well-documented tendency of workaday emotions to spill over at home, it makes sense to avoid workplaces where the deck is stacked against you.

Act quickly when troubles arise. Women working outside the home have been blamed for higher rates of divorce. In fact, working women leave unhappy marriages at higher rates, but not unions that are happy or average, say preliminary findings by researchers at Ohio State and Stanford universities. "If a woman can support herself, she's more likely to think it's viable to leave," says Stanford's Paula England. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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A countervailing factor: Dual-earner couples tend to share housework and child care more evenly, making marriages happier and offsetting divorce risk, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage: A History."

Whatever the case, if your marriage starts to slide, act right away to change damaging behaviors or take counseling or a marriage-education program (findable at www.smartmarriages.com).

Studies aside, the final unit of analysis is the relationship. Ms. Deroian says the best wisdom gleaned from her "quest to solve the question of 'forever' " in marriage came from a cab driver she rode with once who had been married 45 years. When she asked how he and his wife did it, he told her about their travels together, and evenings spent dancing. "At the end of the day," she says, "you have to take time to enjoy one another."








Several years after Americans woke up to a bedbug problem, the pest-control industry is rolling out an arsenal of methods that promise an easy yet thorough assault on the bloodthirsty pests.

Bedbugs, which can be difficult to spot, are becoming even tougher to eradicate as they spread and their resistance to some pesticides grows. In response, pest-control companies are adopting new tactics.

Stern Environmental Group LLC, a Secaucus, N.J., company that serves the New York City area, recently started using a technology that sprays the bugs with icy carbon dioxide to kill them. ThermaPure Inc., of Ventura, Calif., uses devices similar to giant hair dryers to heat up a room and bake the bugs to death. Bedbugs & Beyond LLC in New York will remove people's furniture from their homes and fumigate it with a poisonous gas. Another method uses specially trained dogs to track down tiny bedbugs and their eggs, helping exterminators target spraying. Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Minnesota are studying bedbugs' behavior in an attempt to develop a trap that simulates a typical victim -- a sleeping human.

Professional treatments, including many of the conventional methods still being used, can start at about several hundred dollars and reach into the thousands.

A simple solution to rid a home of the common bedbug, or Cimex lectularius, has proven elusive since the brown, wingless creatures made a resurgence in the U.S. about five years ago. Both entomologists and the pest-control industry say they have seen a rise in infestations of homes and hotels; Steven Jacobs, an urban entomologist at Penn State University who identifies insects for homeowners and pesticide companies, says he now receives about 30 bedbug specimens a year, compared with almost none about five or six years ago.

Bedbugs are slightly smaller than an apple seed and hide in the folds and seams of mattresses and other furniture, emerging at night to feed on a warm-blooded host. Part of what makes bedbugs so tricky to eradicate is that the insects aren't confined to the bed. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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They live in drapes, behind wall hangings, in the cracks of wall plaster -- and even in light fixtures and electronics. Further complicating matters, a female can deposit the tiny eggs around a room. The bugs are transported from one location to another in luggage or clothing; pest experts say the bugs likely accompany travelers home from hotels or enter a house on secondhand furniture.

Entomologists say it is unclear why the pests have made a comeback, but theories include a more restrained use of other pesticides that in the past might have helped to nab bedbugs, and an upswing in international travel.

Bedbug bites can produce itching welts, but the bugs aren't known to carry disease. Still, they can be quite a nuisance and take a powerful psychological toll. Some people don't sleep well for months, worrying that every itch is a bug on them, and many feel ashamed to tell their relatives or neighbors about the problem.

Bedbugs typically have been treated with a class of chemicals known as pyrethroids. Yet entomologists who study bedbug control say the insects have developed some resistance to these chemicals. Other chemicals are more effective but can take longer to work. Mattress encasements may be successful in eliminating bugs -- but only from the mattresses.

Companies pitching the latest eradication methods -- such as heat or icy sprays -- say they are more effective as well as more palatable for people worried about using pesticides. Yet entomologists caution there still are drawbacks: The cold spray might not reach every bug; dogs can miss hiding places high up in a room; and heating might cause bugs to flee to a cooler place in the home. Except for heating, the latest methods usually require the homeowner to go through the onerous process of clearing out rooms, drawers and closets, and washing or dry cleaning all clothing and linens.

"We don't have any easy method of elimination," says Michael Potter, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky who has observed an increase in bedbugs through his research and work with pest-control companies. "We are looking for the silver bullet."

While visiting her father's home over Christmas, Chance Fechtor developed 40 bites on her body that doctors suspected were from bedbugs. Convinced she had brought the bugs home with her, Ms. Fechtor took apart her bed and went though her clothes looking for them. She even starting waking up in the middle of the night and donning a headlamp in hopes of nabbing them.

After doing some research, she came across Advanced K9 Detectives in Milford, Conn., which trains dogs to spot bedbugs. A dog found some bugs in the mattress, the carpet, a drawer and behind a radiator. The house was sprayed with pesticides, and Ms. Fechtor says her Boston-area home has since remained pest-free.

"It was very stressful," she says. "The idea that there were I don't how many bugs on me while I was sleeping completely grossed me out."

Pest-control experts and researchers say dogs can indeed be helpful for finding bedbugs humans might miss or to confirm a treatment has gotten rid of all the bugs. Pepe Peruyero, who last year started training bedbug-sniffing dogs for pest control companies at his J & K Canine Academy in High Springs, Fla., says the cost can be about $200 an hour, depending on home size and travel time.

Another solution is killing the bugs and their eggs by heating a room to between 120 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours. ThermaPure uses infrared heaters to uniformly heat the room, says President and Chief Executive David Hedman. Treatment costs between $500 and $1,000 per room. (Easily melted items like candles and lipstick must first be removed.)

At the opposite end of the temperature spectrum, Cryonite, made by CTS Technologies, a unit of Venteco PLC in London, aims to eradicate the bugs by dousing them with a snowy spray of carbon dioxide. A drawback: Some bugs can survive if they aren't directly hit by the spray. Treatments cost between $600 to $700 per room, or as much as 50% more than a conventional chemical treatment, says Douglas Stern, managing partner of Stern Environmental, one of the companies using the method.

Meanwhile, desperate homeowners who don't want to pay hundreds of dollars are taking matters into their own hands, putting sticky tape on or near their beds to snare the bugs, vacuuming compulsively or ordering do-it-yourself solutions online. Entomologists say tape and vacuuming aren't likely to eliminate the bugs and over-the-counter products might kill only the bugs that people can see.

"It's getting the ones that are hiding that is the problem," says Susan C. Jones, an associate professor of entomology at Ohio State University. Louis J Sheehan
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Groundbreaking research suggests genes help explain why some people can recover from a traumatic event while others suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. Though preliminary, the study provides insight into a condition expected to strike increasing numbers of military veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, one health expert said.

fly

A new vaccine lowers blood pressure in hypertensive people, a study shows. The finding breaks ground in a field dominated by drug therapy.

Surges in blood pressure make physical exertion possible, but chronically elevated pressure spells trouble. Scientists have entertained the idea of immunizing people against high blood pressure for decades, but it hasn't been easy. The only other vaccine to reach the testing stage in people failed to reduce blood pressure.

A vaccine may augment or offer an alternative to blood pressure medications, known to cause side effects.

Several compounds orchestrate blood pressure changes, including a small protein called angiotensin. When cleaved by an enzyme, angiotensin signals blood vessels to constrict, increasing pressure.

Researchers created the new vaccine by binding angiotensin to a harmless fragment of a virus. The protein "is then recognized by the immune system as a virus," says study coauthor Martin Bachmann, an immunologist at Cytos Biotechnology in Schlieren, Switzerland. The immune system makes antibodies against angiotensin and pulls it out of circulation.

Bachmann and his colleagues gave 48 people with mild-to-moderate high blood pressure three injections of the vaccine over 12 weeks. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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Some received higher doses than others. Another 24 volunteers received sham injections. All patients used devices that monitored their blood pressure regularly day and night.

Two weeks after the last shot, those getting a higher dose of vaccine averaged systolic (top number) blood pressure that was 9 points less than those getting the placebo shots, the researchers report in the March 8 Lancet. The diastolic (bottom number) reading dropped only 4 points, a difference that could reflect chance.

However, compared with the sham-injection group, participants getting the higher vaccine dose had reductions of 25 points for the systolic reading and 13 points for the diastolic during early morning, when their risk of stroke is highest.

The antibodies circulate in the body for 17 weeks, less time than most vaccines.

The biggest problem doctors face in treating hypertension is patients' failure to take their pills, says Sheila Gardiner, a cardiovascular physiologist at the University of Nottingham, England. The vaccine approach might offer convenience, she says. "It's definitely better than taking pills day after day."

And though the blood pressure decrease may seem small, Gardiner says, even 5 points in the diastolic reading decreases the risk of heart failure and stroke by one-third.

It remains unclear whether the vaccine could engender a reaction against one's own tissues, says Ola Samuelsson, a nephrologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Göteborg, Sweden. He expects pharmaceutical companies to conduct long-term tests that might answer that question.

The vaccine doesn't appear to be 100 percent effective, he says, and that's just as well. Some angiotensin in circulation would allow blood pressure to crank up in case of trauma.




With Bear Stearns Cos. cratered by a cash crunch, investors turned a nervous eye on the other big Wall Street companies, worried that they, too, could become vulnerable if markets turned against them.

Brokerage shares, already massacred this year, plunged Friday, reflecting the nervousness around firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

Aside from Bear, whose shares fell 47%, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. incurred the most investor wrath. Shares of the firm, which is Bear's closest cousin on Wall Street, tanked 15%. Investors invoked the 1998 liquidity squeeze that battered Lehman as a reason to bail on the stock.

In a statement Friday, a Lehman spokeswoman said: "Our liquidity position has been and continues to be very strong. We consider the liquidity framework under which we have operated for almost a decade to be a competitive advantage."

Investors were astonished at the speed of Bear's demise, which added to the jitters. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
On a conference call Friday, Bear executives said the firm's liquidity suddenly worsened over the past week. Bear's plight indicates how important it is to have enough ready cash on hand to replace liquidity that is withdrawn by creditors.

Sanford Bernstein analyst Brad Hintz explained the nightmare that can befall a broker in a liquidity squeeze. "As lenders demand their money, a broker has no choice but to sell assets and shrink its balance sheet. At some point the liquid assets are all gone and the firm cannot sell the illiquid ones," he said.

Brokerages amass large cash piles -- often called liquidity reserves in their financial statements -- that are meant to see them through rocky periods in the markets. Analysts are now trying to assess whether these liquidity reserves, which measure the amount of high-quality assets that brokerages could easily sell, are sufficient.

Compared with other brokerages, Bear's cash reserve gives it the least cushion for a cash crisis. This same analysis makes Lehman's cash cushion look slimmer than its peers', although on other measures it is just as strong.

Brokerages break out the size of this emergency cash in their financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. To gauge its sufficiency, the reserve can be compared to the main type of debt that brokerages rely on to finance their operations. This debt is called collateralized borrowing, because to get the loans the brokerages have to pledge assets as security to the creditor. If these creditors pull back sharply, a brokerage is in deep trouble.

From public comments by Bear executives Friday, it appears much of the liquidity squeeze was caused by a pulling back by creditors that had extended loans based on collateral provided by Bear. These types of creditors "were no longer willing to provide financing," Samuel Molinaro, Bear's chief financial officer, said on the Friday call.

Bear would have been particularly exposed to this withdrawal, because its emergency cash pile was small compared to this debt. On Nov. 30, that cash reserve of $17 billion was only about 17% of the $102 billion owed through secured financings.

If the prices of assets Bear had pledged fell, the brokerage would have had to post a payment to the creditor called margin. http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
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One big purpose for the emergency funds is to have the cash to make margin payments during a credit-markets crisis. "My guess is that Bear did not adequately stress-test and didn't have enough liquidity to meet those margin payments," said Michael Peterson, director of research at Pzena Investment Management.

Like Bear, Lehman is a big bond player and also one of the smaller Wall Street firms. But it is on sturdier ground than Bear, many investors said. "I'm pretty comfortable with Lehman's liquidity," said Mr. Peterson, whose firm owns Lehman shares. "The lessons of 1998 were not at all lost on Lehman."

Aiming to make its balance sheet sturdier after 1998, Lehman became less reliant on short-term borrowing, which can dry up quickly. At the end of November, it had $28 billion in debt coming due in the following 12 months, well below the $34.9 billion in its liquidity reserve. "What gives me comfort right now is that Lehman has very little short-term debt," Mr. Peterson said.

The firm's emergency-cash pile was 19% of its $182 billion in secured financings, putting it below the numbers for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. At those firms the emergency cash was 38%, 39% and 34%, respectively, of collateralized financings.

Yesterday, Lehman announced that it closed a new $2 billion unsecured credit line that was "substantially oversubscribed."

In a crunch, Lehman may be able to raise cash by selling another big pool of liquid assets, which is valued at more than $60 billion. Adding that to the liquidity cash reserve gives Lehman a potential $100 billion cash pile, equal to 54% of collateralized financing. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
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That is ahead of some other brokers and far stronger than Bear's 31%.

In addition, the debt that comes from the collateralized financing typically is matched by a similar loan to another customer, which creates an asset. When offset against each other, the collateralized financing liability becomes much smaller. In Lehman's case, it is about $20 billion, which is only about 60% of its emergency cash.


The smallest voltmeter in the world has produced a shocking revelation: Lurking deep inside an ordinary cell are electric fields strong enough to cause a bolt of lightning.

While it has long been gospel that cell membranes contain strong electric fields, researchers have generally assumed that 99.9 percent of a cell’s volume was electrically dormant. But when University of Michigan biophysical chemist Raoul Kopelman, the tiny voltmeter’s inventor, flooded rat brain cells with the devices, he detected fields as strong as 15 million volts per meter throughout.


This is the first time the voltmeter has been used in a study, and its potential is as exciting as Kopelman’s find. It is roughly one-thousandth the size of any other voltmeter; thousands can fit in a single cell and still take up only one-millionth of the cell’s volume. The device is filled with voltage-sensitive dye that gives off green to red light in proportion to the surrounding electric field. The light is then measured using a microscope, yielding a three-dimensional map of the electric fields.

Kopelman plans to continue using his device to probe cells for clues about what happens when diseases or toxins injure them.


On January 3, 2008, more than a hundred thousand people gathered at the Sri Durga Malleswara temple in southern India, setting the stage for disaster. When the crowd surged forward to garland a statue of the goddess Durga, six were trampled and killed.

Disasters like this kill hundreds of people a year and have typically been hard to prevent. But now an intervention may be at hand, thanks to crowd simulations developed by Paul M. Torrens, a geographer at Arizona State University. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/2841488/
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Torrens’s computer simulations let planners drop a few thousand virtual people into a burning building, then sit back and take notes—with heat coming only from the computer itself. The specific scenarios Torrens creates could show firefighters how to save the most people, tell architects where to place exits or barriers in stadiums, and guide police forces in corralling unruly mobs.

Most traditional methods for simulating the movement of crowds treat individuals as purely physical, with no social or emotional reactions. Torrens’s model, on the other hand, turns each individual into an “avatar” with an artificial mind. Avatars can plan their own route, adjust their path on the fly, and even respond to the body language of fellow cybercitizens who may be jostling them.

Each avatar’s awareness in Torrens’s simulations derives from a “vision cone”—a field of view—that pro–jects into the world of the simulation itself. As the simulated crowd moves, an avatar reacts to anything that comes within its cone, whose dimensions may change depending on how quickly that avatar is moving or whether it is panicked—both speed and panic will make the cone narrower. Also influencing the dimensions of the cone are personal attributes like age, disabilities, and body type. The system relies mostly on the auton–omy of the avatars, enabling Torrens to create realistic computerized simulations for almost any situation or length of time.

The model is already functional, but Torrens, who is funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $1.15 million, is busy upping the avatars’ IQs. He is also in talks with a few interested parties, including the Scottsdale, Arizona, police department, which may want the system customized for its internal use. Even the U.S. Department of Justice is reviewing a proposal.

Torrens thinks this is just the start. He sees the day when his simulations could be modified to model disease transmission through casual contact, shopping on a crowded street, or pedestrian safety at a traffic intersection. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
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His latest project: a riot module to test ways of containing civil turmoil.





On the Arantix Mountain Bike from newbie Delta 7 Sports, the typical solid-cylinder tubing has been replaced by an airy, see-through lattice woven from a carbon-fiber composite and bundled in Kevlar string. The resulting gossamer web may look delicate, but pound for pound this quirky construction—called IsoTruss—is stronger than steel, aluminum, and titanium. It’s even stronger than solid carbon composites, the current front-runners among ultralight bike frames.

Like other carbon-fiber frames, this one is baked: Long, thin strands of carbon atoms, organized in a hexagonal pattern and coated with epoxy resin, are put in an oven at 255 degrees Fahrenheit for four hours of curing. Unlike other carbon-fiber frames, though, the Arantix could withstand a direct shrapnel hit. The lattice structure isolates damage to a single element instead of shattering under pressure, Delta 7 says.

Despite all its empty spaces, the handmade Arantix frame costs a hefty $6,995 (a full bike is $11,995). At 2.75 pounds, it falls just short of a featherweight record among mountain bikes, but the IsoTruss easily supports the 200-pound-plus Clydesdale racers that its competitors shun. Our advice? Skip the frame: It would be cheaper (and healthier) to go on a diet.













Could there be another planet lurking in the dark, frigid outskirts of the solar system?
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This isn’t as silly as it seems at first. No, I’m not talking Nibiru or any of that other nonsense (and it is nonsense), I’m talking about an actual planet, Earth-sized or so, that could be orbiting the Sun well beyond Pluto Neptune.
Why would we think there might be one out there?
We see some stars in the midst of forming planets. The stars are surrounded by thick disks of material, and in some we can actually see gaps in the disk, dark rings like the gaps in Saturn’s rings, that we think are due to forming planets gobbling up material in the ring. You’d think the disk would fade away with distance form the star, like our air gets thinner with altitude. But some disks appear to have sharp outer edges. This can be caused by a planet orbiting outside the disk; its gravity sweeps up the material and over time cleans up everything farther out. In one disk, this sharp boundary indicates a planet 200 AU out (an AU is the distance of the Earth to the Sun, about 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles).
Neptune orbits at 30 AU from the Sun, so 200 AU is a long way out. Could a planet like that have formed in our solar system? Maybe. Thing is, while our proto-planetary disk has been gone for billions of years, we do have lots of objects out past Neptune: the Trans-Neptunian Objects (they have lots of names, including Kuiper Belt Objects). These are basically giant balls of ice, some hundreds of miles across. As a group they form a puffy disk of objects stretching from Neptune’s orbit outward… but they seem to abruptly stop past about 50 AU out from the Sun. That’s called the Kuiper Cliff, the cause of which is unknown. Incidentally, it’s not because they’re too faint to see (that is, they’re there but we can’t spot them); at that distance we should have spotted lots of them by now.
Not only that, but a lot of these objects have orbits that are tilted more and are more elliptical than you’d expect if they just formed a long time ago and were left alone. Theyir orbits don’t bring them in very close — they tend to stay outside of Neptune’s orbit — but again, this is something that needs to be explained.
Could it be that there is another massive planet orbiting the Sun, way out there, which has swept up the objects gravitationally, creating the Kuiper Cliff and tossing the iceballs into tilted, oval orbits?
A newly released paper shows that may very well be the case. A team of scientists ran a whole mess of simulations, and found that a small planet (in this case, around half the size of the Earth) could have formed inside Neptune’s orbit (where there was plenty of material in the early solar system), gotten tossed into a bigger orbit by Neptune, and then knocked around the orbits of the iceballs, distorting their orbits and creating the Kuiper Cliff.
This idea is not new, but this new research is a provocative indicator of such a planet’s likelihood of existence. I’m not saying it’s out there, but it’s worth looking for. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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In fact, I’ve been saying that since about 1998 or so, when I worked on Hubble and was involved with a project that found a truncated disk around another star. I even worked with another astronomer on the team to investigate whether the robotic telescopes used to look for Near Earth Asteroids could spot such a planet.
It’s not all that easy. It wouldn’t be too faint to see, necessarily, but it’s a big sky. At that distance, the planet would move slowly, and the orbital motion would be hard to distinguish given the procedures used by NEA searches. We tried to convince some of them to modify their software to look for Planet X (yes, why not, though now it would be Planet IX), but we were met with mixed success. The fact that no one has discovered this planet shows you that this is still hard to do.
But maybe, just maybe, with this new research we’ll get people looking more seriously. It’s amazing to me that we can understand so much about galaxies and hugely distant objects, but find that there may be surprises waiting for us in our own back yard.







If you've checked the grammar of a Microsoft Word document, you may have encountered a baffling number. The readability formula purports to represent the text's appropriate grade level. But it has its roots in research from 60 years ago.

Before computers, reading researchers attempted to quantify the ease of a work of writing using short excerpts and simple formulas. Despite computing advances, Word still follows the same model: It multiplies 0.39 by the average number of words per sentence, adds that to 11.8 times the average number of syllables per word, and subtracts 15.59 from the total. The result is the supposed minimum grade level of readers who can handle the text in question.

Similar formulas are used by textbook publishers and in dozens of states' guidelines for insurance policies. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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Is it possible to quantify the readability of a given text? Do you ever use these formulas? Share your thoughts in the blog comments.

From the beginning, these formulas were known to be problematic. A 1935 paper laid out more than 200 variables that affect readability. Most formulas incorporate just two, and not because they are the most important but because they are the easiest to measure. Then they're mashed together, with weights set according to how the formulas work on standard texts.

"Everyone is waiting for this magic bullet that's very easy," says Karen Schriver, who runs an Oakmont, Pa., communication-design research company. But her experience with clients who have overly relied on these formulas have suggested that "maybe it's just a stupid idea."

Noting that the same passage's score can differ by three grade levels or more, depending on the formula, readability consultant Mark Hochhauser says, "One of the things the field really needs is an updated formula."

Even neurolinguist G. Harry McLaughlin says of his own, widely used SMOG Readability Formula, "The theoretical basis is c---."

The formulas treat writing as a mere collection of words and spaces. Word meaning and sentence structure don't figure. George Weir, a philosopher and computer scientist at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, says Word's readability test thinks grade-schoolers could handle the nonsense passage, "Acuity of eagles whistle truck kidney. Head for the treacle sump catch and but. What figgle faddle scratch dog and whistle?" Similarly, "Had lamb little a Mary" and "Mary had a little lamb" score identically.

I asked Micro Power & Light Co., which sells readability-testing software, to evaluate a memorable 2004 Wall Street Journal front-page article. Four different formulas found it to be comprehensible to 10th-graders, thanks in part to its short sentences. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/

The reason for the frequent periods: The article was about a new book written without verbs, and the article mimicked its subject, making for intentionally tough reading.

Word length is an imperfect measure. "Important" and "elephant" are long words that are easy for most readers, Dr. Schriver notes. Conversely, frustrated crossword solvers encounter plenty of uncommon three-letter words, such as adz, auk and lea. She adds that no formulas account for document layout -- even short sentences with lean words are challenging when printed in an eight-point type.

The formulas have their defenders. Readability consultant William DuBay calls them "good enough," and adds, "They've been extremely beneficial for millions of readers." Among other uses, they were implemented to simplify newspaper writing a half-century ago, he says.

Some researchers are trying to make the formulas better, using new databases and computing power. Prof. Weir aims to create a formula that incorporates the frequency of words and word combinations in typical English writing, meaning "the" and "adz" finally can be distinguished.

Several more-advanced readability formulas already have been developed. None are as convenient, or as criticized, as the Flesch-Kincaid formula Microsoft uses. Developed by readability researcher Rudolf Flesch in 1948, it was modified by psychologist J. Peter Kincaid in a study for the U.S. Navy in 1975, using reference passages. "Do not swing, twirl, or play with the nightstick" is part of a passage deemed appropriate for seventh-graders. Instructions that included, "All the jet streams of the Northern Hemisphere have their southern analogues" required a college degree.

The formula was tweaked once more by Microsoft when the company incorporated it into Word in 1993. Grade-level scores were capped at 12. Reed Shaffner, Microsoft's product manager for Word, told me that the formula was changed in 2003, at least for Windows users. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
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Those users can see results up to grade level 14, while Mac users won't get results above level 12.

Why cap the results at all? "It's a user-experience thing," Mr. Shaffner says. Essentially, Microsoft is concerned about the readability of readability-formula results.

Prof. Kincaid, who today is the head of a modeling and simulation program at the University of Central Florida, tried unsuccessfully to get the formula corrected years before it finally was. Nevertheless, when he wants to use his own formula, he lets Word do the calculation.

That's rare. "I write long sentences and no computer is going to tell me how to write," Prof. Kincaid says. "I'm going to write the way I want to write."









"With all his unashamed enthusiasm, Elagabalus was not the man to establish a religion; he had not the qualities of a Constantine or yet of a Julian; and his enterprise would perhaps have met with little success even if his authority had not been annulled by his idiosyncrasies. The Invincible Sun, if he was to be worshipped as a sun of righteousness, was not happily recommended by the acts of his Invincible Priest."


Contemporary or near-contemporary historians sealed the reputations of many of the Roman emperors shortly after their deaths. Among the good ones were Augustus, Trajan, Vespasian and Marcus Aurelius. Those with names that have lived in infamy include Nero, Caligula, Domitian and Elagabalus.

"At the same time, he will learn of the Romans' discernment, in that these last [Augustus, Trajan, Vespasian, Hadrian, Pius, Titus and Marcus] ruled long and died by natural deaths, whereas the former [Caligula, Nero, Vitellius and Elagabalus] were murdered, dragged through the streets, officially called tyrants, and no man wishes to mention even their names."




During this time he caused the murder of his co-ruler, his brother Geta, and his supporters, raised the pay for soldiers, waged campaigns in the East where Macrinius was to have him assassinated, and implemented the (Constitutio Antoniniana 'Antonine Constitution'). http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
The Antonine Constitution was named for Elagabalus whose imperial name was Varius Avitus Bassianus Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. It extended Roman citizenship throughout the Roman Empire.
Macrinus Easily Rises to the Imperial Purple
Caracalla had appointed Macrinius to the influential position of praetorian prefect. Because of this lofty position, three days after Caracalla's murder, Macrinius, a man without senatorial rank, was powerful enough to compel the troops to proclaim him emperor.

Less competent as military leader and emperor than his predecessor, Macrinius suffered losses in the East and wound up making settlements with the Parthians, Armenians, and the Dacians. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/
Defeats and Macrinius' introduction of a two-tiered pay for soldiers made him unpopular with the soldiers.
Caracalla's mother had been Julia Domna of Emesa, Syria, second wife of the emperor Septimius Severus. She had conceived the idea of propelling her great-nephew to the throne, but ill health prevented her involvement. The grandson of her sister Julia Maesa was Varius Avitus Bassianus who would soon be known as Elagabalus.


Sir Ronald Syme calls one of the biographies of the time, Aelius Lampridius' The Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus, a "farago of cheap pornography." One of the contentions made by Lampridius is that Julia Symiamira (Soaemias), Julia Maesa's daughter, had made no secret of her liaison with Caracalla. In the year 218, Varius Avitus Bassianus was performing the hereditary family function of high priest of the sun god whose worship was popular with the troops. A family resemblance to Caracalla probably led them to believe Varius Avitus Bassianus (Elagabalus) the illegitimate son of the more popular emperor Caracalla.

"The artful Maesa saw and cherished their rising partiality, and readily sacrificing her daughter's reputation to the fortune of her grandson, she insinuated that Bassianus was the natural son of their murdered sovereign. The sums distributed by her emissaries with a lavish hand silenced every objection, and the profusion sufficiently proved the affinity, or at least the resemblance, of Bassianus with the great original."


One of the legions near their family hometown proclaimed Elagabalus emperor, naming him Marcus Aurelius Antoninus on May 15, 218. Other legions joined the cause. Meanwhile, still other troops rallied to defend Macrinius. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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On June 18 Elagabalus' faction won in battle. The new emperor was 14.

*I don't remember the source of that Syme quote. It is referred to on The Toynbee Convector.

"I can't imagine that many people went in for this kind of prank. Having said that, I suppose Elagabalus' guests were relieved to have been subjected to something so relatively harmless!"
As emperor, Varius Avitus became known by the Latinized version of the name of his Syrian god El-Gabal. Elagabalus also established his god as the principal one of the empire. He further alienated Rome by taking honors upon himself before they had been awarded him -- including substituting his name for that of Macrinius as consul.

In both the message to the senate and the letter to the people he styled himself emperor and Caesar, the son of Antoninus, the grandson of Severus, Pius, Felix, Augustus, proconsul, and holder of the tribunician power, assuming these titles before they had been voted, and he used, not the [na]me [of Avitus,] but that of his [pretended] f[ather]... [and] commanded that if anyone resisted him, he should call on the soldiers for assistance....


Herodian, Dio Cassius, Aelius Lampridius and Gibbon have written about Elagabalus' femininity, bisexuality, transvestism, and forcing a vestal virgin to break vows that were so solemn any virgin found to have violated them was buried alive.


He appears to have worked as a prostitute and may have sought the original transgendering operation. If so, he didn't succeed. When he tried to become a gallus, he was convinced to undergo circumcision, instead. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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To us the difference is immense, but to Roman men, both were humiliating.

Although Elagabalus killed many of his political enemies, especially supporters of Macrinius, he wasn't a sadist who tortured and put an inordinate number of people to death. He was an attractive, hormonally charged teen with absolute power, the high priest of an exotic god and a Roman emperor from Syria who imposed his eastern customs on Rome. J.B. Bury believes that with the universal citizenship grant of Caracalla, a universal religion was necessary. The time for a unified religion may have been right when Elagabalus tried to institute it, but because of his flamboyance and failure to behave like a proper Roman, he failed. It was another century before Constantine could impose a universal religion.
Ultimately, like most of the emperors of the period, Elagabalus was killed by his soldiers, after less than four years in power. He was 17. His first cousin Alexander Severus, also from Emesa, Syria, succeeded him.

His father Calpornius held both civic and clerical offices when Patrick was born to him in the late fourth century (c. A.D. 390). Although the family lived in the village of Bannavem Taberniaei, in Roman Britain, Patrick would one day become the most successful Christian missionary in Ireland, its patron saint, and the subject of legends.

Patrick's first encounter with the land to which he would devote his life was an unpleasant one. He was kidnapped at age sixteen, sent to Ireland, and sold into slavery. While Patrick worked there as a shepherd, he developed a deep faith in God. One night, during his sleep, he was sent a vision of how to escape. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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So much he tells us in his autobiographical Confession.

Unlike the work of the same name by the theologian, Augustine, Patrick's Confession is short, with few statements of religious doctrine.
In it Patrick describes his British youth and his conversion, for, although he was born to Christian parents, he did not consider himself Christian before his captivity. Another purpose of the document was to defend himself to the very Church that had sent him to Ireland to convert his former captors. Years before Patrick wrote his Confession, he wrote an angry Letter to Coroticus, the British King of Alcluid (later called Strathclyde), in which he condemns him and his soldiers as compatriots of the demons, because they had captured and slaughtered many of the Irish people Bishop Patrick had just baptized. Those they didn't kill would be sold to "heathen" Picts and Scots. Although personal, emotional, religious, and biographical, these two pieces and Gildas Bandonicus' Concerning the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) provide the main historical sources for fifth century Britain.

Upon Patrick's escape from his approximately six years of slavery, he went back to Britain, and then to Gaul where he studied under St. Germain, bishop of Auxerre, for twelve years before returning again to Britian. There he felt a calling to return as a missionary to Ireland. He stayed in Ireland for another thirty years, converting, baptizing, and setting up monasteries.

Sources
orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/early/origins/rom_celt/Romessay.html
Sub-Roman Britain: An Introduction
Christopher Snyder looks at the sources for early Britain, particularly in the writings of Patrick and Gildas.

Gildas: from Concerning the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae)
From Medieval Sourcebook, chapters 23-26 of Gildas' work on the fall of Britain.

Gildas
Ecole Glossary entry on Gildas the Wise who was born c. 500 in Arecluta, Strathclyde, and traveled in Ireland, besides writing his history of the Celts in Britain.

Various legends have grown up concerning St. Patrick, the most popular of the Irish saints.

St. Patrick was not well-educated, a fact he attributes to early captivity. Because of this, it was with some reluctance that he was sent as missionary to Ireland, and only after the first missionary, Palladius, had died. Perhaps it's because of his informal schooling in the meadows with his sheep that Patrick came up with the clever analogy between the three leaves of the shamrock and the Holy Trinity. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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At any rate, this lesson is one explanation for why St. Patrick is associated with a shamrock.

St. Patrick is also credited with driving the snakes out of Ireland. There were probably no snakes in Ireland for him to drive out, and it is very likely that the story was meant to be symbolic. Since Patrick converted the heathen, the snakes are thought to stand for the pagan beliefs or evil. Where he was buried is a mystery.
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Among other places, a chapel to St. Patrick at Glastonbury claims he was interred there. A shrine in County Down, Ireland, claims to possess a jawbone of the saint which is requested for childbirth, epilectic fits, and to avert the evil eye.

While we don't know exactly when he was born or died, this Roman British saint is honored by the Irish, especially in the United States, on March 17 with parades, green beer, cabbage, corned beef, and general revelry. While there is a parade in Dublin as the culmination of a week of festivities, Irish celebrations on St. Patrick's Day itself are predominantly religious.



Basics About Hercules (Greek: Heracles/Herakles): Hercules was a half-brother of Apollo and Dionysus because their father was Zeus. Zeus, disguised as Alcmene's husband Amphitryon, paid a conjugal visit to Hercules' mother, Alcmene. Hercules and his twin, mortal, half-brother, Iphicles, son of Alcmene and the real Amphitryon, were in their cradle when a pair of snakes visited them. Hercules happily strangled the snakes, possibly sent by Hera or Amphitryon, thereby launching an extraordinary career that included the well-known 12 labors Hercules performed for his cousin Eurystheus.

Here are more of Hercules' deeds and feats with which you should be familiar.
Instruction of Hercules: Hercules was talented in many areas. Castor of the Dioscuri taught him to fence, Autolycus taught him to wrestle, King Eurytus of Oechalia in Thessaly taught him archery, and Orpheus' brother Linus, son of Apollo or Urania, taught him to play the lyre. [Apollodorus.]

Cadmus is usually attributed with introducing letters into Greece, but Linus taught Hercules, and the not very academically inclined Hercules broke a chair over Linus' head and killed him. Elsewhere, Cadmus is credited with killing Linus for the honor of introducing writing to Greece. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com/
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[Source: Kerenyi, Heroes of the Greeks]
Hercules and the Daughters of Thespius: King Thespius had 50 daughters and wanted Hercules to impregnate them all. Hercules, who went hunting with King Thespius each day, was unaware that each night's woman was different (although he may not have cared), and so he impregnated 49 or 50 of them. The women gave birth to 51 sons who are said to have colonized Sardinia.
Hercules and the Minyans: The Minyans were exacting a heavy tribute from Thebes -- the usually cited birthplace of the hero -- while it was ruled by King Creon. Hercules encountered the Minyan ambassadors en route to Thebes and cut off their ears and noses, made them wear their bits as necklaces, and sent them back home. The Minyans sent a military force, but Hercules defeated it and freed Thebes from the tribute.

Creon rewarded him with his daughter Megara for his wife.
The Augean Stables Reprised, With Dishonor: King Augeas had refused to pay Hercules for cleaning his stables during the 12 Labors, so Hercules led a force against Augeas and his twin nephews. Hercules contracted a disease and asked for a truce, but the twins knew it was too good an opportunity and so continued to try to annihilate Hercules' forces. When the Isthmian Games were about to begin, the twins set out for them, but by this time, Hercules was on the mend. He dishonorably attacked and killed them, and then went to Elis where he installed Augeas' son, Phyleus, on the throne in place of his treacherous father.
Madness of Hercules: Euripides' tragedy Hercules Furens is one of the sources for the madness of Hercules. The story, like most of those involving Hercules, has confusing and contradictory details, but in essence, Hercules, returning from the Underworld in some confusion, mistook his own sons, ones he had with Creon's daughter Megara, for those of Eurystheus. Hercules killed them and would have continued his murderous rampage had Athena not lifted the (Hera-sent) madness or ate. Many consider the 12 Labors Hercules performed for Eurystheus his atonement. Hercules may have married Megara to his nephew Iolaus before leaving Thebes forever.
Fight With Apollo: Iphitus was the son of Apollo's grandson Eurytus, father of the beautiful Iole. In Book 21 of the Odyssey, Odysseus obtains the bow of Apollo when he helps in the hunt for Eurytus' mares. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
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Another part of the story is that when Iphitus came to Hercules looking for the missing dozen mares, Hercules welcomed him as a guest and then hurled him to his death from a tower. This was another dishonorable murder for which Hercules needed to atone. The provocation may have been that Eurytus denied him the prize of his daughter that Hercules had won in a bow-shooting contest.
Possibly in search of atonement, Hercules arrived at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, where the murderer was not allowed sanctuary. Hercules took the opportunity to steal the tripod and cauldron of Apollo's priestess.

Apollo came after him and was joined by his sister. On Hercules' side, Athena joined the fight. It took Zeus and his thunderbolts to put an end to the fighting, but Hercules still hadn't made atonement for his act of murder.

* Apollo, Asclepius, and Admetus

Omphale: For atonement Hercules was to endure a similar term to the one Apollo had served with Admetus. Hermes sold Hercules as a slave to the Lydian queen Omphale. In addition to getting her pregnant and tales of transvestism, the story of the Cercopes and the Black-bottomed Hercules comes from this period. Omphale (or Hermes) also set Hercules to work for a treacherous robber named Syleus. With wanton vandalism Hercules demolished the thief's property, killed him, and married his daughter Xenodike.
Deianeira: The final phase of Hercules' mortal life involves his wife Deianeira, daughter of Dionysus (or King Oineus) and Althaia.

* Exchange and the Maiden

When Hercules was taking his bride home, the centaur Nessus was to ferry her across the Euenos River. The details are varied, but Hercules shot Nessus with poisoned arrows when he heard the screaming of his bride being ravaged by the centaur. The centaur persuaded Deianeira to fill her water jug with blood from his wound, assuring her it would be a potent love potion should Hercules' eye ever start to wander. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
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Instead, it was a potent poison. When Deianeira thought Hercules was losing interest and preferring Iole to herself, she sent him a robe drenched in the centaur's blood. Hercules put it on and his skin burned.

* Poisoned Clothing

He wanted to die, but was having trouble finding someone to set his funeral pyre alight so he could self-immolate. Finally, Philoctetes or his father agreed and received Hercules' bow and arrows as a thanks offering. These were essential for the Greeks in the Trojan War. As Hercules burned he was taken to the gods and goddesses and gained full immortality and Hera's daughter Hebe for his final wife.





In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” were flashed on the screen every five seconds for 1/3,000 second—well below the threshold of conscious awareness. Vicary said soda and popcorn sales spiked as a result of what he called “subliminal advertising.”

Psychologists had been studying subliminal messages since the late 19th century. It was Vicary’s ideas, presented in Vance Packard’s 1957 best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, that catapulted the concept of subliminal advertising into the public consciousness. Even though in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age Vicary admitted that the amount of data he’d collected was “too small to be meaningful,” subliminal messages continued to attract public—and commercial—interest.

In 1974, the FCC held hearings about the perceived threat of subliminal advertising and issued a policy statement saying that “subliminal perception” was deceptive and “contrary to the public interest.”

Concerns about subliminal advertising continued for decades. As recently as 2000 during the presidential race, the Republican National Committee ran an ad attacking the policies of Al Gore in which the word rats briefly flashed on the screen. Many suspected subliminal intent, which the ad’s creator denied.

Matthew Erdelyi, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College, says that while Vicary’s methods were controversial, new studies continue to suggest the use of subliminal perception in advertising could be effective. “There’s a lot of interest, but the subject matter is a little bit taboo,” he says. Still, if subliminal messages in advertising have a resurgence in the future, “nobody should be terribly surprised.”



THE STUDY
“Emotional Well-Being Does Not Predict Survival in Head and Neck Cancer Patients” by James Coyne et al., published in the December 1, 2007, issue of Cancer.

THE QUESTION
Do emotions influence a cancer patient’s prognosis? In one of the largest, longest, and most controlled studies of its kind, researchers investigated whether the emotional state of cancer patients has any relationship to their survival.

THE METHODS
University of Pennsylvania psychologist James Coyne and his colleagues followed 1,093 adults, all of whom had advanced head and neck cancer with nonspreading tumors. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
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All patients received standardized medical care through clinical trials run by the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG).
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Clcik here!

At the start of the study, the participants completed a 27-item questionnaire used to evaluate the physical, social, and emotional quality of life in people with cancer and other chronic diseases. Five items targeted emotional state, asking patients to rate, on a scale of 0 to 4, the extent to which statements like “I feel sad” and “I am losing hope in my fight against my illness” had been true for them over the past seven days. The researchers then calculated a score for each person’s initial emotional well-being.

Coyne tracked patients for an average of nine years, until they either dropped out of the study or died. The study reported 646 deaths. Once the records for the participants were complete, researchers analyzed the data. “We were surprised to find absolutely no relationship” between emotion and survival, Coyne says.

The researchers then looked at emotion and survival in greater detail, examining data for the most buoyant optimists, the most despondent individuals, and patients with complicating factors like smoking. In none of these analyses did emotional well-being affect survival. Because the study was so large and long, it gathered far more information than previous investigations of emotion and cancer survival. In smaller studies, Coyne says, it can be difficult to tell whether deaths were related to a factor like emotion or were simply due to chance.

While the huge pool of subjects and the controlled clinical trial conditions give the study statistical heft, Coyne acknowledges a few limitations. Having only people with head and neck cancers in the study eliminates the variability of a group suffering from different forms of the disease, but it also eliminates information about whether patients with other forms of cancer would show the same results. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Additionally, patients had to be judged “mentally reliable”—able to follow instructions and keep appointments—in order to qualify for the clinical trials, so their emotional scores might not represent the full spectrum of psychological states among cancer patients.

THE MEANING
Coyne says this is the most in-depth study of its kind, and until a study with a similar sample size proves otherwise, he is convinced there is no conclusive relationship between emotional well-being and cancer survival. Many cancer patients struggling to maintain a positive outlook—and fearing that their lives depended on it—have contacted Coyne to express relief that their survival may not be dependent on their emotions. “Having a positive outlook is not going to extend the quantity of life,” Coyne says. “Not everybody is capable of being positive when they have cancer.”

STATS BEHIND THE STUDY
• A 2004 study found that 72 percent of the public and 86 percent of cancer patients believe psychological factors affect cancer survival. Only 26 percent of oncologists agree.
• About 25 percent of breast cancer patients who joined support groups told researchers in a 2005 study that they attended to improve their immune systems.
• Four previous studies indicate that people with better psychological function do survive longer with cancer—but four others suggest that a healthier psychological condition predicts shorter survival time. More than a dozen studies have found no relationship between the two variables.
• A 2007 study found that the emotional, physical, and social questionnaire Coyne used is effective at predicting depression.
• Major depression afflicts about 25 percent of all cancer patients.
• The two clinical trials in Coyne’s study were conducted by the RTOG, which had a $13 million budget in 2007 and is funded by the National Cancer Institute.
• The American Cancer Society cited 1.4 million new cases of cancer in the United States in 2007 and more than 500,000 cancer deaths, with about 11,000 due to head and neck cancer.

SECOND OPINION
While this study attempts to correct factors that muddied previous research, few experts think the question of cancer and emotion is closed. Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel notes that coping strategies are an important part of the picture and that they were not addressed by Coyne’s research. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
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He points to a study of breast cancer patients that provides evidence that survival has to do more with how people deal with emotions than how they feel. (Coyne believes the sample size in that study was inadequate and says larger studies oppose Spiegel’s contention.) Spiegel says support groups and other therapies might improve outcomes by helping patients manage stress and improve communication with doctors. Coyne acknowledges the possibility that psychological support could affect survival by mechanisms other than emotional well-being but says no methodologically sound study has yet shown a relationship.



The patient is unconscious; an ice pick protrudes from each eye socket. When the doctor steps back to take a photograph, one of the ice picks slips. The patient’s life ends in that instant. The doctor, unfazed, moves along to his next demonstration.

The doctor is Walter Freeman, pioneer of the infamous transorbital lobotomy, and the PBS documentary “The Lobotomist” tells the gruesome story of his rise and fall.

Freeman, the laboratory director at a mental hospital, spent many late nights bent over the dissecting table at the morgue. He was convinced that mental illness had its roots in the brain but couldn’t find any consistent differences between the brains of healthy and mentally ill individuals. Then he heard of a radical new treatment for mental illness: drilling into the skull and disconnecting the frontal lobe. The Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in 1949 for inventing that procedure, but Freeman made it faster, easier, and more portable.


By the mid-1940s, Freeman was touring the country performing dozens of ice-pick lobotomies each day. He used picks from his own kitchen and carpenter’s hammers. Sometimes, for kicks, he’d operate left-handed. Physicians who gathered to watch would throw up and pass out—but patients often got better. Freeman could turn people who were smearing feces on walls and cowering naked under furniture into calm and docile citizens.

Unfortunately, along with their madness, they lost their personalities. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Freeman fell from institutional favor in the mid-1950s, when long-term studies began to reveal his technique’s failings and drugs like Thorazine came to market. In response he moved his practice west and began to operate on new kinds of patients: discontented housewives, for example, and unruly children. One was four years old.

“The Lobotomist” raises questions that remain urgently relevant in an age when pharmaceutical companies help define what it means to be mentally ill. “Is the absence of pain what we should look for? The absence of caring? The absence of anxiety?” journalist Robert Whitaker asks in the film. “Is that a good thing—or is that what makes us human?”


Papa Freud didn’t leave his psychoanalytic offspring without issues. In Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (HarperCollins, $32.50), psychiatrist George Makari traces analysis from its birth trauma and jittery adolescence through a conflicted young adulthood. He reveals the constantly shifting landscape of analytic trends, the roundelay of alliances and betrayals, schools—and reform schools—of thought. Collaborations. Fallings-out. One colleague thought Sigmund Freud was actually planning to murder him over a disagreement.

All the Big Names, and lots of lesser ones, make appearances. Many anecdotes, predictably, deal with sex. Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, wrote porn under an alias. Philosopher Otto Weininger, Makari tells us, “recommended a complete renunciation of sexuality even for propagation, published his magnum opus, and promptly committed suicide later that year.”

Some analysts held that masturbation caused madness; others thought it cured madness. Some were fanatical teetotalers, others wild libertines. One was even dubbed “the Pied Piper of carnality.” A major pillar of the early psychoanalysis movement, repeatedly accused of child molestation and other sexual excesses, fled his homeland; another famous analyst died in jail.

There were ethnic, racist, sexist, and religious hissy fits: Women were emotion machines destined for hysteria; blacks were inherently uncivilizable. Zurich’s Protestant analysts (Jung) maintained a tense relationship with Vienna’s Jewish group (Freud). Freud’s sexually perplexed protégé Fritz Wittels wrote, “As Sancho Panza rides behind Don Quixote, so syphilis behind Christianity.” Hungarian Jewish-born Max Südfeld, writing as Max Nordau, “believed Jews were disproportionately degenerate. To ameliorate this hereditary curse, Nordau lamely advised the practice of gymnastics.” Gymnastics? Pole-vault your way to stability? And what, exactly, does that pole represent?

Makari’s story portrays Freud as a complex, driven, troubled, egotistical visionary intent on establishing a legitimate new science but also a canny politician lusting for fame and success. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com/
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To that end, the author writes, Freud was not above “borrowing” others’ ideas, adapting them to his own theories, even undermining colleagues’ contributions if he felt they threatened his primacy. Freud eventually admitted that—despite the most purely Freudian self-analysis in history—even he was not immune to the forces of repressed sexuality.







1) It’s a barred spiral.
You might know that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, perhaps the most beautiful galaxy type. You’ve seen ‘em: majestic arms sweeping out from a central hub or bulge of glowing stars. That’s us. But a lot of spirals have a weird feature: a rectangular block of stars at the center instead of a sphere, and the arms radiate away from the ends of the block. Astronomers call this block a bar, and, you guessed it: we have one.
Is fact, ours is pretty big. At 27,000 light years end-to-end, it’s beefier than most bars. Of course, space is a rough neighborhood. Who wouldn’t want a huge bar located right downtown?
2) There’s a supermassive black hole at its heart.
At the very center of the Galaxy, right at its very core, lies a monster: a supermassive black hole.
We know it’s there due to the effect of its gravity. Stars very near the center — some only a few dozen billion kilometers out — orbit the center at fantastic speeds. They scream around their orbits at thousands of kilometers per second, and their phenomenal speed betrays the mass of the object to which they’re enthralled. Applying some fairly basic math, it’s possible to determine that the mass needed to accelerate the stars to those speeds must tip the cosmic scales at four million times the mass of the Sun! Yet in the images, nothing can be seen. So what can be as massive as 4,000,000 Suns and yet not emit any light?
Right. A black hole.
Even though it’s huge, bear in mind that the Galaxy itself is something like 200 billion solar masses strong, so in reality the black hole at the center is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. And we’re in no danger of plunging into it: after all, it’s 250,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers away.
It’s thought now that a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy forms along with the galaxy itself, and in facts winds blown outward as material falls in affects the formation of stars in the galaxy. So black holes may be dangerous, but it’s entirely possible the Sun’s eventual birth — and the Earth’s along with it — may have been lent a hand by the four million solar mass killer so far away.
3) It’s a cannibal.
Galaxies are big, and have lots of mass. If another, smaller galaxy passes too close by, the bigger galaxy can rip it to shreds and ingest its stars and gas.
The Milky Way is pretty, but it’s savage, too. It’s currently eating several other galaxies. They’ve been ripped into long, curving arcs of stars that orbit the center of the Milky Way. Eventually they’ll merge completely with us, and we’ll be a slightly larger galaxy. Ironically though, the galaxies add their mass to ours, making it more likely we’ll feed again. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
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Eating only makes galaxies hungrier.
4) We live in a nice neighborhood…
The Milky Way is not alone in space. We’re part of a small group of nearby galaxies called — get ready to be shocked — the Local Group. We’re the heaviest guy on the block, and the Andromeda galaxy is maybe a bit less massive, though it’s actually spread out more. The Triangulum galaxy is also a spiral, but not terribly big, and there are other assorted galaxies dotted here and there in the Group. All together, there are something like three dozen galaxies in the Local Group, with most being dinky dwarf galaxies that are incredibly faint and difficult to detect.
5) … and we’re in the suburbs.
The Local Group is small and cozy, and everyone makes sure their lawns are mowed and houses painted nicely. That’s because if you take the long view, we live in the suburbs. The big city in this picture is the Virgo Cluster, a huge collection of about 2000 galaxies, many of which are as large or larger than the Milky Way. It’s the nearest big cluster; the center of it is about 60 million light years away. We appear to be gravitationally bound to it; in other words, we’re a part of it, just far-flung. The total mass of the cluster may be as high as a quadrillion times the mass of the Sun.
6) You can only see 0.000003% percent of it.
When you got out on a dark night, you can see thousands of stars. But the Milky Way has two hundred billion stars in it. You’re only seeing a tiny tiny fraction of the number of stars tooling around the galaxy. In fact, with only a handful of exceptions, the most distant stars you can readily see are 1000 light years away. Worse, most stars are so faint that they are invisible much closer than that; the Sun is too dim to see from farther than about 60 light years away… and the Sun is pretty bright compared to most stars. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
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So the little bubble of stars we can see around us is just a drop in the ocean of the Milky Way.
7) 90% of it is invisible.
When you look at the motions of the stars in our galaxy, you can apply some math and physics and determine how much mass the galaxy has (more mass means more gravity, which means stars will move faster under its influence). You can also count up the number of stars in the galaxy and figure out how much mass they have. Problem is, the two numbers don’t match: stars (and other visible things like gas and dust) make up only 10% of the mass of the galaxy. Where’s the other 90%?
Whatever it is, it has mass, but doesn’t glow. So we call it Dark Matter, for lack of a better term (and it’s actually pretty accurate). We know it’s not black holes, dead stars, ejected planets, cold gas — those have all been searched for, and marked off the list — and the candidates that remain get pretty weird (like WIMPs). But we know it’s real, and we know it’s out there. We just don’t know what it is. Smart people are trying to figure that out, and given the findings in recent years, I bet we’re less than a decade from their success.
8) Spiral arms are an illusion.
Well, they’re not an illusion per se, but the number of stars in the spiral arms of our galaxy isn’t really very different than the number between the arms! The arms are like cosmic traffic jams, regions where the local density is enhanced. Like a traffic jam on a highway, cars enter and leave the jam, but the jam itself stays. The arms have stars entering and leaving, but the arms themselves persist (that’s why they don’t wind up like twine on a spindle).
Just like on highways, too, there are fender benders. Giant gas clouds can collide in the arms, which makes them collapse and form stars. The vast majority of these stars are faint, low mass, and very long-lived, so they eventually wander out of the arms. But some rare stars are very massive, hot, and bright, and they illuminate the surrounding gas. These stars don’t live very long, and they die (bang!) before they can move out of the arms. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
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Since the gas clouds in the arms light up this way, it makes the spiral arms more obvious.
We see the arms because the light is better there, not because that’s where all the stars are.
9) It’s seriously warped.
The Milky Way is a flat disk roughly 100,000 light years across and a few thousand light years thick (depending on how you measure it). It has the same proportion as a stack of four DVDs, if that helps.
Have you ever left a DVD out in the Sun? It can warp as it heats up, getting twisted (old vinyl LPs used to be very prone to this). The Milky Way has a similar warp!
The disk is bent, warped, probably due to the gravitational influence of a pair of orbiting satellite galaxies. One side of the disk is bent up, if you will, and the other down. In a sense, it’s like a ripple in the plane of the Milky Way. It’s not hard to spot in other galaxies; grab an image of the Andromeda galaxy and take a look. At first it’s hard to see, but if you cover the inner part you’ll suddenly notice the disk is flared up on the left and down on the right. Andromeda has satellite galaxies too, and they warp its disk just like our satellite galaxies warp ours.
As far as I can tell, the warp doesn’t really affect us at all. It’s just a cool thing you may not know about the Milky Way. Hey, that would make a good blog entry!
10) We’re going to get to know the Andromeda galaxy a lot better.
Speaking of Andromeda, have you ever seen it in the sky? It’s visible to the naked eye on a clear, dark, moonless night (check your local listings). It’s faint, but big; it’s four or more degrees across, eight times the apparent size of the Moon on the sky.
If that doesn’t seem too big, then give it, oh, say, two billion years. Then you’ll have a much better view.
The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching each other, two cosmic steam engines chugging down the tracks at each other at 200 kilometers per second. Remember when I said big galaxies eat small ones? Well, when two big galaxies smack into each other, you get real fireworks. Stars don’t physically collide; they’re way too small on this scale. But gas clouds can, and like I said before, when they do they form stars. So you get a burst of star formation, lighting up the two galaxies.
In the meantime, the mutual gravity of the two galaxies draw out long tendrils from the other, making weird, delicate arcs and filaments of stars and gas. It’s beautiful, really, but it indicates violence on an epic scale.
Eventually (it takes a few billion years), the two galaxies will merge, and will become, what, Milkomeda? Andromeway? Well, whatever, they form a giant elliptical galaxy when they finally settle down. In fact, the Sun will still be around when this happens; it won’t have yet become a red giant. Will our descendants witness the biggest collision in the history of the galaxy?
That’s cool to think about. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
Incidentally, I talk about this event a whole lot more, and in a lot more detail, in my upcoming book Death from the Skies! In case you forgot about that.
Until then, these Ten Things should keep you occupied. And of course, I only wanted to list ten things so I could give this post the cool title. But if there’s something you find surprising about the Milky Way, leave a comment! I don’t want to hog all the fun.




So, while Democrats scuffle, it's time for Republican Sen. John McCain to start thinking about picking his running mate.

Here's what he needs in a vice-presidential sidekick: A younger politician who is viewed as a potential president, and also can help win the South, woo social conservatives, and shore up Sen. McCain's weaknesses on economic policy. Oh, and being a woman would be nice, too.

The person who perfectly fits that description doesn't exist, of course, meaning this will be an interesting choice. It takes on greater importance for Sen. McCain because of the simple and unavoidable fact that he is 71 years old, and will be 72 by Election Day.

That inevitably invites questions about whether his running mate would be a suitable president. (Interesting trivia: Sen. McCain turns 72 on Aug. 29, one day after the Democratic national convention ends and three days before the Republican one begins. Which party will make a bigger fuss about his birthday?)

One could make a case for Sen. McCain making his choice early, to defuse the age issue a bit and draw attention away from the Democratic race. But the Democrats are busy slicing and dicing each other in their prolonged battle for their party's nomination, so maybe there's no advantage for Sen. McCain in drawing attention away from that.

Right now, there's no sign Sen. McCain is in a big hurry. He's just ordered advisers to undertake an in-depth study of how other candidates have gone about picking running mates. "It's going to be a big decision because it's going to be the first time voters are going to look at his decision-making process," says Scott Reed, who ran Republican Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign.

The vetting and guessing process already is under way, so it's a good time to look at three groups of contenders:

Fellow senators. There's a surprisingly short list of possibilities among Sen. McCain's Senate colleagues. He is friendly with Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, who is beloved by social conservatives, and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been a voice of intelligence and reason on the fight against terrorism. But Sen. Brownback didn't deliver Kansas for Sen. McCain (former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won there), and Sen. Graham is probably only the second-most-plausible possibility out of South Carolina. (See governors below.)

The most intriguing Senate possibility is Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who is reliably conservative and would give Republicans a bit of diversity that might help them in a year when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are battling to represent the other side. But Sen. Hutchison represents a state that Republicans are highly likely to win anyway, and she isn't well known nationally.

Fellow presidential hopefuls. Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson seems unlikely because, among other things, at age 65 he doesn't project the kind of youth desired to offset Sen. McCain's age. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani got along famously with Sen. McCain after dropping out of the race, but he actually would exacerbate doubts among social conservatives.

Mr. Huckabee showed great strength in two areas where Sen. McCain needs help: He's strong among social conservatives and in the South, where he beat Sen. McCain several times. But he may be too socially conservative for a general-election audience -- and would he be seen as presidential?

In many ways, the best running mate for Sen. McCain, on paper at least, might be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. As a former businessman, his strength would be the domestic economy, which could be crucial in a campaign that may well be run in the midst of a recession. He won over economic conservatives in his own presidential effort, and he looks and sounds presidential.

But it never appeared that he and Sen. McCain much liked each other, so the big question is whether the chemistry is, or could be, right.

Governors. Interesting possibilities here. Charlie Crist of Florida is popular in his home state, one central to the general election, and was an important McCain backer. He isn't well known and scrutinized nationally, though.

Mark Sanford of South Carolina is young (47), with some Washington experience from his days in the House of Representatives, and he is popular among the party's economic conservatives for his crusades against government spending. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, says Gov. Sanford is "perfect ideologically, solid on spending. He's governed as governor the way McCain says he'd govern as president." Haley Barbour of Mississippi would reassure party regulars of all stripes, but his background as a lobbyist is a problem.

Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who matches Gov. Sanford in relative youth (also 47), was an early McCain backer and is deft on the kinds of real-world economic issues that aren't exactly Sen. McCain's strength. Mr. Norquist recently sang his praises for vetoing a state transportation plan that included tax increases. And Minnesota is an important swing state (though Gov. Pawlenty's support wasn't enough to prevent Sen. McCain from losing the state's caucuses to Mr. Romney).

Finally, here's an intriguing possibility: How about Louisiana's new governor, Bobby Jindal? He definitely provides youth (age 36), is a former Rhodes scholar who's actually worked on health-care reform while running Louisiana's health agency, and has experience in the House. As an Indian-American, he'd go a long way toward defusing the Republican Party's current image as anti-immigrant, and he's Catholic to boot, which helps with a key constituency. OK, he's probably too young -- but he sure is articulate and that, plus his nontraditional ethnic background, makes him appear to be a kind of Republican version of Sen. Obama.





The first South Korean astronaut, Yi So-yeon, is set to launch in April on a Russian rocket headed for the International Space Station.There are several stories here. One is that she is the first Korean astronaut, which is cool. The second is that she replaces Ko San, who was slated to be the first, but broke some rules the Russians have set. They appear to be minor infractions involving training manuals — the first was he sent a manual home by accident, he says, and a second violation involved getting a manual he was not supposed to receive — but the Russian space agency takes those rules seriously, and after formally apologizing twice, I don’t blame Korea for replacing him.
The third story is that Dr. Yi is young — 29 — and has a PhD in bioengineering. Wow. I had just gotten my degree when I turned 29, but I wasn’t also training to be an astronaut!
The fourth aspect of this is that Dr. Yi a woman. I wish this weren’t news, but a casual perusal of the list of space-travelers makes it clear it is. The good news is, in my opinion, soon this won’t be news. Women will travel in space as much as men, and eventually we’ll be an egalitarian space-faring species.
I look forward to that time very much, and so I wish Dr. Yi a good launch and journey, and hope that one day her travels won’t be news any more.




The symptoms of some genetic diseases are so nonspecific that it can take years for a child to be diagnosed. Even when a doctor suspects a specific disorder, such as Noonan syndrome, a developmental disorder that can affect the skeletal system, heart, eyes, language, and speech, but usually not intelligence, testing can cost thousands of dollars and sometimes requires months to complete. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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Peter Hammond of University College London is developing a faster, potentially cheaper approach that uses computer analysis to spot facial characteristics associated with a variety of genetic disorders.

Hammond first projects a pattern of thousands of dots onto a patient’s face and then takes photos of the face from different angles with a digital camera, capturing the positions of the dots. Software converts the data into a three-dimensional “map” of the person’s face and compares this map to models of the face shapes linked with various genetic syndromes, including Noonan, Williams, and Fragile X. If the computer analysis indicates, for example, wide-set eyes, low ears, a small jaw, and drooping eyelids, the program might match it with Noonan syndrome, which often includes these features. Among children with one of the genetic disorders for which Hammond has compiled a face shape model, this technique has demonstrated greater than 90 percent accuracy.

So far, Hammond has modeled 12 of the 30 disorders he has studied. But your hospital might not be able to afford a scan machine yet. Custom-made to Hammond’s specs, they cost $40,000 to $60,000 each.

Russian Jewish oligarchs seem to embrace Israel. The major reason behind their interest to the Promised Land is its non-extradition statute: Israeli law generally bans rendering a Jew to foreign prosecution. Israel is also notoriously lax on money laundering and foreign tax evasion: police investigate money laundering only when it coincides with a major tax evasion in Israel. Another reason why Russian oligarchs love Israel is because she is a backwater village to them susceptible to inexpensive takeover.

Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs invariably participate in those countries’ elections; large business there is inseparable from politics. The costs and difficulties involved in Russian and Ukrainian politics dwarf those of Israel. It is not unusual for a Ukrainian oligarch to spend $10-30 million for his own tiny party in parliamentary elections; contributions to large parties, especially in Russia run much higher. Parliamentary seats are sold at $4-10 million apiece. In comparison, the power in Israel comes on the cheap. Russian oligarchs see Israel as a political investment opportunity. For them, it is not only or even primarily a matter of profiting from politics, but mostly a way to realize their dreams of power. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
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They come so close to power in Russia and Ukraine but are always vulnerable to anti-Semitic rulers. In Israel, the oligarchs can finally dominate.

Israeli politics is very provincial. Even a no-one called Netanyahu rose to power by hiring American campaign managers and investing relatively little in advertising. Peace Now became prominent by using forty-year-old tricks of political campaigning. Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs possess vastly more sophisticated experience of managing political campaigns and imagine they can influence Israeli politics efficiently.

The oligarchs are way smarter than average Israeli politicians; it’s hard to find a person sillier than an average MK. But it takes luck rather than genius to become an oligarch in Russia, and the magnates often overestimate their political power. The oligarchs are proverbially hapless in politics, consistently losing their political investment on the advice of cheating campaign managers.
Thus we see Michael Cherny and Vadim Rabinovich investment in Lieberman going sour: after short-term success, Lieberman the phony predictably loses his support base. Cherny and Rabinovich bet on a commonsense idea of militant Russian identity in Israel, but once that idea failed to bring Lieberman’s electorate substantial improvement, they weren’t able to redefine his platform. With Likud making inroads into Lieberman’s Russian audience, and ad hoc parties such as the Pensioners’ taking their share of Russian voters, Lieberman’s project is doomed. Lieberman will retain some supporters, bent on taking him for messiah, but their number would guarantee him only an insignificant position in the Knesset. It is possible that Lieberman can heat up his voters with demagoguery once again, but his trend is downward. Lieberman’s case is the first Israeli instance of a widespread Ukrainian phenomenon: parties which depend on lone oligarchs are doomed. The oligarchs cannot allow their parties to be strongly anti-government, and so the parties lose their opposition identity, become mild and unattractive for voters. Lieberman’s oligarchic sponsors do not rationally depend on Israeli government as they make money elsewhere, but so far they habitually avoid alienating the ruling establishment.

Or consider a Jew with an odious last name, Gaydamak (gaydamaks are the worst anti-Semitic strain of Cossacks). He partners with KGB/ FSB in many businesses, from Soviet foreign debts to weapons sales, but now miraculously converted into Israeli philanthropist. Gaydamak was always frank about his social and eventually political ambitions in Israel. After the years of being derogatory called “Arkasha” by his KGB overseers, Gaydamak wants to become a political boss. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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His entourage of Israeli advisors is laughable, though; they play the king rather than trying to make him. In Israeli political vacuum, Gaydamak’s bizarre political party can get even 14 seats, but will hardly enter the Knesset in subsequent elections. Messianically minded Jews have elected a number of such single-session parties, and almost none of them staged a comeback. Gaydamak’s sensible social slogans target voters across the political spectrum, thus making him dangerous to every politician. Upon entering the Knesset, Gaydamak would likely be ostracized by fellow politicians. He can make a decent political figure: not prone to petty corruption and not very left.
Like other very rich Jews, Gaydamak cannot be right or Jewish: such stance would offend his Gentile friends and business partners. Olmert likewise describes Bush whose peace process kills the Jewish state as very friendly; Jewish values and interests are an uncivil obstacle in the friendly chat of ex-Jews with fellow Gentiles. It is impolite to stubbornly insist on Abraham’s right to Hebron and Jacob’s right to Schem when a friendly powerful Gentile wants to help you out of that mess with Arabs that his predecessors set up. It is ludicrous to speak of Jewish choosiness, truth of Judaism, and religious right to the land at business meetings and debauch parties. Gaydamak, accordingly, spends money to alleviate the harm done by defeatism rather than helps to achieve the victory; he helps Sderot refugees rather than outpost settlers.

Lev Levaev comes very close to being the fifth column. His major income source, trade in Russian diamonds, wholly depends on Putin’s whim; Levaev, therefore, have to carefully dance to Putin’s tune. And so Levaev sponsors the alien Russian culture in Israel; instead of integrating the Russian Jews into Israeli milieu, they are kept distinct. Levaev also fosters political ties between Israel and anti-Semitic Russia; his role is especially dangerous because of his contacts in the highest political echelons of Israel. Levaev cooperates with Putin and, for example, on Angola diamonds – with Mossad’s ex-chief Mossad Danny Yatom. It is plausible that he acts as a link between them, essentially abetting a high treason. Levaev, like other oligarchs, is left: an aggressive, religiously charged Jewish state is not good for his business. Superficially, Levaev supports Chabad charities, but his own shopping malls work on Shabbat. The Jewish schools Levaev sponsors in Russia and Ukraine are thinly disguised assimilationist shops which teach formalized religion, hateful to the children, instead of the real Judaism and Jewish values. Levaev is a typical religious atheist who separates God from business. Like Vyacheslav Kantor and so many others, Levaev chose the respectful position of Putin’s court Jew instead of simply being a person true to Judaism.

The latest Russian Jewish oligarch who established connection with Israel is Roman Abramovich. He survived Putin’s purges of Jewish oligarchs, and exhibits absolute loyalty to the Russian regime; a shred of loyalty to anti-Semitic Russia amounts to treason against Israel. Abramovich is far richer than any other Israeli oligarch and, considering his extravagant spending habits, can reach almost any political goal, if only temporarily. There is no doubt that Abramovich would be as left and pro-Russian as the other oligarchs. He has a history of social mega-projects in Chukotka, a far Siberian region where he serves as absentee governor. Abramovich is therefore likely to follow in Gaydamak’s steps, starting with huge cocktail parties and ending with pompous welfare projects. Given Abramovich’s track record of keeping low political profile in Russia, he is unlikely to exhibit political ambitions in Israel.

Putin’s tremendous influence on Russian Jewish oligarchs presents a problem. Putin is very different from previous Russian leaders: he is not a nomenclature bureaucrat who carefully charts his course, but a petty KGB officer turned corrupt businessman turned politician turned tsar. Putin is, in a sense, rootless; he lacks political fundamentals. His thinking is that of the proverbial “new Russian” businessman, entirely lacking strategic dimension. The nearest Western analogy is of a spoiled and not particularly bright child who suddenly became a large company’s CEO. Putin is unpredictable; he makes moves based on curiosity and desire to show his power. Now the Putin-controlled Jewish magnates can establish control over Israel. They can spend much more on elections than any Israeli party, and invest more in the electoral-oriented welfare than any charity. In all likelihood, the MAPAI-built security apparatus of Israel would grind the oligarchs. And we shouldn’t pity them.