Tag Archives: United States

Idea Soup, tD

Is Walmart Wiccan? Is BestBuy Baptist? Is McDonalds Methodist?

So much for the Roberts Supreme Court. Conservatives would suggest that the court is intent on protecting the Constitution from assault by progressive liberals and upholding its libertarian conservativism. Yet, protections of and for the individual seem to have taken a backseat to recent rulings that promote corporate power — a somewhat new invention; perhaps, none more so than recent decisions that ruled corporations to be “people”. But the court is not standing still — not content with animating a business with lifeblood, soon, the court is likely to establish whether corporations have a religious spirit as well as individual sentience. Sticks of oxymoronic progressivism.

From the Washington Post:

If you thought this “corporations are people” business was getting out of hand, brace yourself. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court accepted two cases that will determine whether a corporation can deny contraceptive coverage to its female employees because of its religious beliefs.

The cases concern two of the most politically charged issues of recent years: who is exempted from the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, and whether application of the First Amendment’s free speech protections to corporations, established by the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, means that the First Amendment’s protections of religious beliefs must also be extended to corporations.

The Affordable Care Act requires employers to offer health insurance that covers contraception for their female employees. Churches and religious institutions are exempt from that mandate. But Hobby Lobby, a privately owned corporation that employs 13,000 people of all faiths — and, presumably, some of no faith — in its 500 craft stores says that requiring it to pay for contraception violates its religious beliefs — that is, the beliefs of its owners, the Green family.

In a brief submitted to a federal court, the Greens said that some forms of contraception — diaphragms, sponges, some versions of the pill — were fine by them, but others that prevented embryos from implanting in the womb were not. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the Greens’ position in June in a decision explicitly based on “the First Amendment logic of Citizens United.” Judge Timothy Tymkovich wrote: “We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.”

Tymkovich’s assessment of how the five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court may rule could prove correct — but what a mess such a ruling would create! For one thing, the Green family’s acceptance of some forms of contraception and rejection of others, while no doubt sincere, suggests that they, like many people of faith, adhere to a somewhat personalized religion. The line they draw is not, for instance, the same line that the Catholic Church draws.

Individual believers and non-believers draw their own lines on all kinds of moral issues every day. That’s human nature. They are free to say that their lines adhere to or are close to specific religious doctrines. But to extend the exemptions that churches receive to secular, for-profit corporations that claim to be following religious doctrine, but may in fact be nipping it here and tucking it there, would open the door to a range of idiosyncratic management practices inflicted on employees. For that matter, some religions have doctrines that, followed faithfully, could result in bizarre and discriminatory management practices.

The Supreme Court has not frequently ruled that religious belief creates an exemption from following the law. On the contrary, in a 1990 majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that Native Americans fired for smoking peyote as part of a religious ceremony had no right to reinstatement. It “would be courting anarchy,” Scalia wrote in Employment Division v. Smith, to allow them to violate the law just because they were “religious objectors” to it. “An individual’s religious beliefs,” he continued, cannot “excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law.”

It will be interesting to see whether Scalia still believes that now that he’s being confronted with a case where the religious beliefs in question may be closer to his own.

The other issue all this raises: Where does this corporations-are-people business start and stop? Under the law, corporations and humans have long had different standards of responsibility. If corporations are treated as people, so that they are free to spend money in election campaigns and to invoke their religious beliefs to deny a kind of health coverage to their workers, are they to be treated as people in other regards? Corporations are legal entities whose owners are not personally liable for the company’s debts, whereas actual people are liable for their own. Both people and corporations can discharge their debts through bankruptcy, but there are several kinds of bankruptcy, and the conditions placed on people are generally far more onerous than those placed on corporations. If corporations are people, why aren’t they subject to the same bankruptcy laws that people are? Why aren’t the owners liable for corporate debts as people are for their own?

Read the entire article here.

Idea Soup

Good Job Mr.Snowden

Far from being a communist sympathizer and U.S. traitor, Edward Snowden has done the United States and the world a great service. Single-handedly he is responsible for some of the most important revelations concerning the inner machinations of the U.S. government, particularly its vast surveillance apparatus headed by the National Security Agency (NSA). Once held in high esteem by much of the world, for its openness and transparency, the continuing revelations now paint the United States as nothing more than a paranoid, security state akin to the ex-Soviet Union.

Mr.Snowden, your life for the foreseeable future is likely to be hellish, but may you sleep soundly in the knowledge that you have helped open our eyes to the egregious actions of a country many no longer trust.

From the Guardian:

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its “customer” departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their “Rolodexes” so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.

The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately “tasked” for monitoring by the NSA.

The revelation is set to add to mounting diplomatic tensions between the US and its allies, after the German chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday accused the US of tapping her mobile phone.

After Merkel’s allegations became public, White House press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement that said the US “is not monitoring and will not monitor” the German chancellor’s communications. But that failed to quell the row, as officials in Berlin quickly pointed out that the US did not deny monitoring the phone in the past.

The NSA memo obtained by the Guardian suggests that such surveillance was not isolated, as the agency routinely monitors the phone numbers of world leaders – and even asks for the assistance of other US officials to do so.

The memo, dated October 2006 and which was issued to staff in the agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID), was titled “Customers Can Help SID Obtain Targetable Phone Numbers”.

It begins by setting out an example of how US officials who mixed with world leaders and politicians could help agency surveillance.

“In one recent case,” the memo notes, “a US official provided NSA with 200 phone numbers to 35 world leaders … Despite the fact that the majority is probably available via open source, the PCs [intelligence production centers] have noted 43 previously unknown phone numbers. These numbers plus several others have been tasked.”

The document continues by saying the new phone numbers had helped the agency discover still more new contact details to add to their monitoring: “These numbers have provided lead information to other numbers that have subsequently been tasked.”

But the memo acknowledges that eavesdropping on the numbers had produced “little reportable intelligence”. In the wake of the Merkel row, the US is facing growing international criticism that any intelligence benefit from spying on friendly governments is far outweighed by the potential diplomatic damage.

The memo then asks analysts to think about any customers they currently serve who might similarly be happy to turn over details of their contacts.

“This success leads S2 [signals intelligence] to wonder if there are NSA liaisons whose supported customers may be willing to share their ‘Rolodexes’ or phone lists with NSA as potential sources of intelligence,” it states. “S2 welcomes such information!”

The document suggests that sometimes these offers come unsolicited, with US “customers” spontaneously offering the agency access to their overseas networks.

“From time to time, SID is offered access to the personal contact databases of US officials,” it states. “Such ‘Rolodexes’ may contain contact information for foreign political or military leaders, to include direct line, fax, residence and cellular numbers.”

The Guardian approached the Obama administration for comment on the latest document. Officials declined to respond directly to the new material, instead referring to comments delivered by Carney at Thursday’s daily briefing.

Carney told reporters: “The [NSA] revelations have clearly caused tension in our relationships with some countries, and we are dealing with that through diplomatic channels.

“These are very important relations both economically and for our security, and we will work to maintain the closest possible ties.”

The public accusation of spying on Merkel adds to mounting political tensions in Europe about the scope of US surveillance on the governments of its allies, after a cascade of backlashes and apologetic phone calls with leaders across the continent over the course of the week.

Asked on Wednesday evening if the NSA had in the past tracked the German chancellor’s communications, Caitlin Hayden, the White House’s National Security Council spokeswoman, said: “The United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel. Beyond that, I’m not in a position to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity.”

At the daily briefing on Thursday, Carney again refused to answer repeated questions about whether the US had spied on Merkel’s calls in the past.

The NSA memo seen by the Guardian was written halfway through George W Bush’s second term, when Condoleezza Rice was secretary of state and Donald Rumsfeld was in his final months as defence secretary.

Merkel, who, according to Reuters, suspected the surveillance after finding her mobile phone number written on a US document, is said to have called for US surveillance to be placed on a new legal footing during a phone call to President Obama.

“The [German] federal government, as a close ally and partner of the US, expects in the future a clear contractual basis for the activity of the services and their co-operation,” she told the president.

Read the entire article here.

Art

Painting the Night

Photographer Noel Kerns turns abandoned roadside attractions into luminous nightscapes using a combination of moonlight and artificial lighting. His book of stunning and eerie images of quintessential, nocturnal Americana — motels, truck stops, classic cars and drive-ins — is titled Nightwatch.

See more of Kerns images here.

Image: Chevys in Bowie, Texas. April 2009. Courtesy of Noel Kerns.

Idea Soup

The Case for Less NSA Spying

Cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier makes an eloquent case of less intrusion by the National Security Agency (NSA) into the private lives of US citizens.

From Technology Review:

Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, last month took on a side gig: helping the Guardian newspaper pore through documents purloined from the U.S. National Security Agency by contractor Edward Snowden, lately of Moscow.

In recent months that newspaper and other media have issued a steady stream of revelations, including the vast scale at which the NSA accesses major cloud platforms, taps calls and text messages of wireless carriers, and tries to subvert encryption.

This year Schneier is also a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In a conversation there with David Talbot, chief correspondent of MIT Technology Review, Schneier provided perspective on the revelations to date—and hinted that more were coming.

Taken together, what do all of the Snowden documents leaked thus far reveal that we didn’t know already?

Those of us in the security community who watch the NSA had made assumptions along the lines of what Snowden revealed. But there was scant evidence and no proof. What these leaks reveal is how robust NSA surveillance is, how pervasive it is, and to what degree the NSA has commandeered the entire Internet and turned it into a surveillance platform.

We are seeing the NSA collecting data from all of the cloud providers we use: Google and Facebook and Apple and Yahoo, etc. We see the NSA in partnerships with all the major telcos in the U.S., and many others around the world, to collect data on the backbone. We see the NSA deliberately subverting cryptography, through secret agreements with vendors, to make security systems less effective. The scope and scale are enormous.

The only analogy I can give is that it’s like death. We all know how the story ends. But seeing the actual details, and seeing the actual programs, is very different than knowing it theoretically.

The NSA mission is national security. How is the snooping really affecting the average person?

The NSA’s actions are making us all less safe. They’re not just spying on the bad guys, they’re deliberately weakening Internet security for everyone—including the good guys. It’s sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create. Additionally, by eavesdropping on all Americans, they’re building the technical infrastructure for a police state.

We’re not there yet, but already we’ve learned that both the DEA and the IRS use NSA surveillance data in prosecutions and then lie about it in court. Power without accountability or oversight is dangerous to society at a very fundamental level.

Are you now looking at NSA documents that nobody has yet seen? Do they shed any light on whether ordinary people, and not just figures like al-Qaeda terrorists and North Korean generals, have been targeted?

I am reviewing some of the documents Snowden has provided to the Guardian. Because of the delicate nature of this, I cannot comment on what I have seen. What I can do is write news stories based on what I have learned, and I am doing that with Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian. My first story will be published soon.

Will the new stories contain new revelations at the scale we’ve seen to date?

They might.

There have been many allusions to NSA efforts to put back doors in consumer products and software. What’s the reality?

The reality is that we don’t know how pervasive this is; we just know that it happens. I have heard several stories from people and am working to get them published. The way it seems to go, it’s never an explicit request from the NSA. It’s more of a joking thing: “So, are you going to give us a back door?” If you act amenable, then the conversation progresses. If you don’t, it’s completely deniable. It’s like going out on a date. Sex might never be explicitly mentioned, but you know it’s on the table.

But what sorts of access, to what products, has been requested and given? What crypto is, and isn’t, back-doored or otherwise subverted? What has, and hasn’t, been fixed?

Near as I can tell, the answer on what has been requested is everything: deliberate weakenings of encryption algorithms, deliberate weakenings of random number generations, copies of master keys, encryption of the session key with an NSA-specific key … everything.

NSA surveillance is robust. I have no inside knowledge of which products are subverted and which are not. That’s probably the most frustrating thing. We have no choice but to mistrust everything. And we have no way of knowing if we’ve fixed anything.

Read the entire article (and let the NSA read it too), here.

Environs

Nuclear Near Miss

Just over 50 years ago the United States Air Force came within a hair’s breadth of destroying much of the South Eastern part of the country. While on a routine flight along the eastern seaboard of the United States, a malfunctioning B-52 bomber accidentally dropped two 4-Megaton hydrogen bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961.

Had either one of these bombs exploded — with a force over 200 times that of the bomb dropped over Hiroshima — the effects would have been calamitous.

From the Guardian:

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons – the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city – putting millions of lives at risk.

Though there has been persistent speculation about how narrow the Goldsboro escape was, the US government has repeatedly publicly denied that its nuclear arsenal has ever put Americans’ lives in jeopardy through safety flaws. But in the newly-published document, a senior engineer in the Sandia national laboratories responsible for the mechanical safety of nuclear weapons concludes that “one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe”.

Writing eight years after the accident, Parker F Jones found that the bombs that dropped over North Carolina, just three days after John F Kennedy made his inaugural address as president, were inadequate in their safety controls and that the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst. “It would have been bad news – in spades,” he wrote.

Jones dryly entitled his secret report “Goldsboro Revisited or: How I learned to Mistrust the H-Bomb” – a quip on Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical film about nuclear holocaust, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy’s Road.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Nuclear weapon test Romeo (yield 11 Mt) on Bikini Atoll. The test was part of the Operation Castle. Romeo was the first nuclear test conducted on a barge. The barge was located in the Bravo crater. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Idea Soup

Nineteenth Century Celebrity

You could be forgiven for believing that celebrity is a peculiar and pervasive symptom of our contemporary culture. After all in our multi-channel, always on pop-culture, 24×7 event-driven, media-obsessed maelstrom celebrities come, and go, in the blink of an eye. This is the age of celebrity.

Well, the U.S. had its own national and international celebrity almost two hundred years ago, and he wasn’t an auto-tuned pop star or a viral internet sensation with a cute cat. His name — Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de La Fayette, a French nobleman and officer, and a major general in the Continental Army.

From Slate:

The Marquis de Lafayette, French nobleman and officer, was a major general in the Continental Army by the age of nineteen. When he returned for a comprehensive tour of the United States in 1824-1825, Lafayette was 67, and was the last man still living who had served at his rank in the Continental Army.

Americans loved the aging soldier for his role in the Revolutionary War, and for his help after the war in smoothing diplomatic relations between the United States and France. Moreover, he was a living connection to his friend and mentor George Washington. The combination made him a celebrity who enjoyed a frenzied reception as he made his way through all 24 states.

Women, especially, poured forth affection for the Marquis. In one beautifully lettered address, the “Young Ladies of the Lexington Female Academy” (Kentucky) showered their visitor with assurances that he was remembered by the new generation of Americans: “Even the youngest, gallant Warrior, know you; even the youngest have been taught to lisp your name.”

Lafayette’s visit inspired the production of souvenir merchandise embroidered, painted, or printed with his face and name. This napkin and glove are two examples of such products.

In his book Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, William L. Bird, Jr. reports that Lafayette was uncomfortable when he encountered ladies wearing these gloves—particularly because a gentleman was expected to kiss a lady’s hand upon first meeting. Bird writes:

When offered a gloved hand at a ball in Philadelphia, Lafayette “murmur[ed] a few graceful words to the effect that he did not care to kiss himself, he [then] made a very low bow, and the lady passed on.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: La Fayette as a Lieutenant General, in 1791. Portrait by Joseph-Désiré Court. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Idea Soup

Is Your Company Catholic or Baptist?

Is your business jewish? Does your corporation follow the book of tao or the book of mormon or those of shadows (wicca) or yasna (zoroastrianism)? Or, is your company baptist, muslim, hindu or atheist or a practitioner in one of the remaining estimated 4,200 belief systems?

In mid-2012 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that corporations are indeed people when it ruled for Citizens United against the State of Montana in allowing unlimited corporate spending in local elections. Now, we await another contentious and perplexing ruling from the justices that may assign spirituality to a corporation alongside personhood.

Inventors of board games take note: there is surely a game to be made from matching one’s favorite companies with religions of the world.

From Slate:

Remember the big dustup last summer over the contraception mandate in President Obama’s health reform initiative? It required companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance, including for contraception, as part of their employees’ health care plans. The constitutional question was whether employers with religious objections to providing coverage for birth control could be forced to do so under the new law. The Obama administration tweaked the rules a few times to try to accommodate religious employers, first exempting some religious institutions—churches and ministries were always exempt—and then allowing companies that self-insure to use a separate insurance plan to pay and provide for the contraception. Still, religious employers objected, and lawsuits were filed, all 60 of them.

A year later, the courts have begun to weigh in, and the answer has slowly begun to emerge: maybe yes, maybe no. It all depends on whether corporations—which already enjoy significant free-speech rights—can also invoke religious freedom rights enshrined in the First Amendment.

Last Friday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the contraception mandate, rejecting a challenge from a Pennsylvania-based cabinetmaker who claimed that as a Mennonite he should not be compelled to provide contraceptive coverage to his 950 employees because the mandate violates the company’s rights under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The owner considers some of the contraception methods at issue—specifically, the morning-after and week-after pills—abortifacients.

The appeals court looked carefully to the precedent created by Citizens United—the 2010 case affording corporations free-speech rights when it came to election-related speech—to determine whether corporations also enjoy constitutionally protected religious freedom. Writing for the two judges in the majority, Judge Robert Cowen found that although there was “a long history of protecting corporations’ rights to free speech,” there was no similar history of protection for the free exercise of religion. “We simply cannot understand how a for-profit, secular corporation—apart from its owners—can exercise religion,” he concluded. “A holding to the contrary … would eviscerate the fundamental principle that a corporation is a legally distinct entity from its owners.”

Cowan also flagged the absolute novelty of the claims, noting that there was almost no case law suggesting that corporations can hold religious beliefs. “We are not aware of any case preceding the commencement of litigation about the Mandate, in which a for-profit, secular corporation was itself found to have free exercise rights.” Finally he took pains to distinguish the corporation, Conestoga, from its legal owners. “Since Conestoga is distinct from the Hahns, the Mandate does not actually require the Hahns to do anything. … It is Conestoga that must provide the funds to comply with the Mandate—not the Hahns.”

Judge Kent Jordan, dissenting at length in the case, said that for-profit, secular corporations can surely avail themselves of the protections of the religion clauses. “To recognize that religious convictions are a matter of individual experience cannot and does not refute the collective character of much religious belief and observance … Religious opinions and faith are in this respect akin to political opinions and passions, which are held and exercised both individually and collectively.”

The 3rd Circuit decision creates a significant split between the appeals courts, because a few short weeks earlier, the Colorado-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., finding by a 5–3 margin that corporations can be persons entitled to assert religious rights. Hobby Lobby is a chain of crafts supply stores located in 41 states. The 10th Circuit upheld an injunction blocking the contraception requirement because it offended the company owners’ religious beliefs. The majority in the 3rd Circuit wrote that it “respectfully disagrees” with the 10th Circuit. A split of this nature makes Supreme Court review almost inevitable.

The Supreme Court has long held the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to prohibit governmental regulation of religious beliefs, but a long line of cases holds that not every regulation that inflects upon your religious beliefs is unconstitutional. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act bars the federal government from imposing a “substantial burden” on anyone’s “exercise of religion” unless it is “the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.” The Obama administration and the judges who have refused to grant injunctions contend that the burden here is insignificant, amounting to a few dollars borne indirectly by the employer to facilitate independent, private decisions made by their female employees. They also argue that they are promoting a compelling government interest in providing preventive health care to Americans. The employers and the judges who have enjoined the birth-control provision claim that they are being forced to choose between violating protected religious beliefs and facing crippling fines and that free or inexpensive birth control is available at community health centers and public clinics.

Basically, the constitutional question will come down to whether a for-profit, secular corporation can hold religious beliefs and convictions, or whether—as David Gans explains here —“the Court’s cases recognize a basic, common-sense difference between living, breathing, individuals—who think, possess a conscience, and a claim to human dignity—and artificial entities, which are created by the law for a specific purpose, such as to make running a business more efficient and lucrative.” Will Baude takes the opposite view, explaining that the 3rd Circuit’s reasoning—that “ ‘corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires’ … would all prove too much, because they are technically true of any organizational association, including … a church!” Baude likens the claim that corporations can never have religious freedom rights to the claim that corporations—including the New York Times—can never have free-speech rights.

Part of the problem, at least in the case of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, is that neither corporation was designed to do business as religious entities. It has been clear since the nation’s founding that corporations enjoy rights in connection to the purposes for which they were created—which is why the administration already exempts religious employers whose purpose is to inculcate religious values and chiefly employ and serve people who share their religious tenets. This is about companies that don’t meet those criteria. As the dissenters at the 10th Circuit observed, the fact that some “spiritual corporations” have some religious purposes doesn’t make every corporation a religious entity. And as professor Elizabeth Sepper of Washington University puts it in a new law-review article on the subject: “Corporations, as conglomerate entities, exist indefinitely and independently of their shareholders. They carry out acts and affect individual lives, and have an identity that is larger than their constituent parts. Walmart is Walmart, even when Sam Walton resigns.”

The rest of the problem is self-evident. Where does it stop? Why does your boss’ religious freedom allow her to curtail your own? The dangers in allowing employers to exercise a religious veto over employee health care are obvious. Can an employer deny you access to psychiatric care if he opposes it on religious grounds? To AIDS medications? To gelatin-covered pills? Constitutional protections of a single employer’s individual rights of conscience and belief become a bludgeon by which he can dictate the most intimate health decisions of his workers, whose own religious rights and constitutional freedoms become immaterial.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of ThinkProgress.

Environs

MondayMap: Feeding the Mississippi

The system of streams and tributaries that feeds the great Mississippi river is a complex interconnected web covering around half of the United States. A new mapping tool puts it all in one intricate chart.

From Slate:

A new online tool released by the Department of the Interior this week allows users to select any major stream and trace it up to its sources or down to its watershed. The above map, exported from the tool, highlights all the major tributaries that feed into the Mississippi River, illustrating the river’s huge catchment area of approximately 1.15 million square miles, or 37 percent of the land area of the continental U.S. Use the tool to see where the streams around you are getting their water (and pollution).

See a larger version of the map here.

Image: Map of the Mississippi river system. Courtesy of Nationalatlas.gov.

BigBang, Technica

Atlas Shrugs

She or he is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 330 pounds, and goes by the name Atlas.

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Surprisingly this person is not the new draft pick for the Denver Broncos or Ronaldo’s replacement at Real Madrid. Well, it’s not really a person, not yet anyway. Atlas is a humanoid robot. Its primary “parents” are Boston Dynamics and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a unit of the U.S. Department of Defense. The collaboration unveiled Atlas to the public on July 11, 2013.

From the New York Times:

Moving its hands as if it were dealing cards and walking with a bit of a swagger, a Pentagon-financed humanoid robot named Atlas made its first public appearance on Thursday.

C3PO it’s not. But its creators have high hopes for the hydraulically powered machine. The robot — which is equipped with both laser and stereo vision systems, as well as dexterous hands — is seen as a new tool that can come to the aid of humanity in natural and man-made disasters.

Atlas is being designed to perform rescue functions in situations where humans cannot survive. The Pentagon has devised a challenge in which competing teams of technologists program it to do things like shut off valves or throw switches, open doors, operate power equipment and travel over rocky ground. The challenge comes with a $2 million prize.

Some see Atlas’s unveiling as a giant — though shaky — step toward the long-anticipated age of humanoid robots.

“People love the wizards in Harry Potter or ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but this is real,” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley artificial intelligence specialist and a co-founder of Industrial Perception Inc., a company that is building a robot able to load and unload trucks. “A new species, Robo sapiens, are emerging,” he said.

The debut of Atlas on Thursday was a striking example of how computers are beginning to grow legs and move around in the physical world.

Although robotic planes already fill the air and self-driving cars are being tested on public roads, many specialists in robotics believe that the learning curve toward useful humanoid robots will be steep. Still, many see them fulfilling the needs of humans — and the dreams of science fiction lovers — sooner rather than later.

Walking on two legs, they have the potential to serve as department store guides, assist the elderly with daily tasks or carry out nuclear power plant rescue operations.

“Two weeks ago 19 brave firefighters lost their lives,” said Gill Pratt, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon, which oversaw Atlas’s design and financing. “A number of us who are in the robotics field see these events in the news, and the thing that touches us very deeply is a single kind of feeling which is, can’t we do better? All of this technology that we work on, can’t we apply that technology to do much better? I think the answer is yes.”

Dr. Pratt equated the current version of Atlas to a 1-year-old.

“A 1-year-old child can barely walk, a 1-year-old child falls down a lot,” he said. “As you see these machines and you compare them to science fiction, just keep in mind that this is where we are right now.”

But he added that the robot, which has a brawny chest with a computer and is lit by bright blue LEDs, would learn quickly and would soon have the talents that are closer to those of a 2-year-old.

The event on Thursday was a “graduation” ceremony for the Atlas walking robot at the office of Boston Dynamics, the robotics research firm that led the design of the system. The demonstration began with Atlas shrouded under a bright red sheet. After Dr. Pratt finished his remarks, the sheet was pulled back revealing a machine that looked a like a metallic body builder, with an oversized chest and powerful long arms.

Read the entire article here.

Environs

United States of Strange

With the United States turning another year older it reminds us to ponder some of the lesser known components of this beautiful yet paradoxical place. All nations have their esoteric cultural wonders and benign local oddities: the British (actually the Scots) have kilts, bowler hats, the Royal Family; Italians have Vespas, governments that last on average 8 months; the French, well they’re just French; the Germans love fast cars and lederhosen. But for sheer variety and volume the United States probably surpasses all for its extreme absurdity.

From the Telegraph:

Run by the improbably named Genghis Cohen, Machine Gun Vegas bills itself as the ‘world’s first luxury gun lounge’. It opened last year, and claims to combine “the look and feel of an ultra-lounge with the functionality of a state of the art indoor gun range”. The team of NRA-certified on-site instructors, however, may be its most unique appeal. All are female, and all are ex-US military personnel.

See other images and read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of the Telegraph.

Art, Idea Soup

Fifty Years After Gettysburg

In 1913 some 50,000 veterans from both sides of the U.S. Civil War gathered at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to commemorate. Photographers of the time were on hand to capture some fascinating and moving images, which are now preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress.

See more images here.

Image: The Blue and the Gray at Gettysburg: a Union veteran and a Confederate veteran shake hands at the Assembly Tent. Courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.

Idea Soup

The College Application Essay

Most U.S. high school seniors have now finished their last days of the last year through the production line that is the educational system. Most will also have a college, and courses, selected from one of the thousands of U.S. institutions that offer further education. Competition to enter many of these colleges is steep and admissions offices use a variety of techniques and measurements to filter applicants and to gauge a prospective student’s suitability. One such measure is the college entrance essay, which still features quite prominently alongside GPA, SAT, and ACT scores and, of course, the parental bank balance.

The New York Times recently featured several student essays that diverged from the norm — these were honest and risky, open and worldly. We excerpt below one such essay for Antioch College by Julian Cranberg:

Ever since I took my first PSAT as a first-semester junior, I have received a constant flow of magazines, brochures, booklets, postcards, etc. touting the virtues of various colleges. Simultaneously, my email account has been force-fed a five-per-week diet of newsletters, college “quizzes,” virtual campus tour links, application calendars, and invitations to “exclusive” over-the-phone question-and-answer sessions. I am a one-year veteran of college advertising.

They started out by sending me friendly yet impersonal compliments, such as “We’re impressed by your academic record,” or “You’ve impressed us, Julian.” One of the funniest yet most disturbing letters I received was printed on a single sheet of paper inside a priority DHL envelope, telling me I received it in this fashion because I was a “priority” to that college. Now, as application time is rolling around, they’ve become a bit more aggressive, hence “REMINDER – University of X Application Due” or “Important Deadline Notice”..

How is it that while I can only send one application to any school to which I am applying, it is okay for any school to send unbridled truckloads of mail my way, applying for my attention? If I have not already made it clear, it’s an annoyance, and, in fact, turns me and undoubtedly others off to applying to these certain schools. However, this annoyance is easy to ignore, and, if I wanted to, I could easily forget all about these mailings after recycling them or deleting them from my email. But beneath the simple annoyance of these mailings lies a pressing and unchallenged issue..

What do these colleges want to get out of these advertisements? For one reason or another, they want my application. This doesn’t mean that their only objective is to craft a better and more diverse incoming class. The more applications a college receives, the more selective they are considered, and the higher they are ranked. This outcome is no doubt figured into their calculations, if it is not, in some cases, the primary driving force behind their mailings..

And these mailings are expensive. Imagine what it would cost to mail a school magazine, with $2.39 postage, to thousands of students across the country every week. The combined postage charge of everything I have received from various colleges must be above $200. Small postcards and envelopes add up fast, especially considering the colossal pool of potential applicants to which they are being sent. Although vastly aiding the United States Postal Service in its time of need, it is nauseating to imagine the volume of money spent on this endeavor. Why, in an era of record-high student loan debt and unemployment, are colleges not reallocating these ludicrous funds to aid their own students instead of extending their arms far and wide to students they have never met? I understand where the colleges are coming from. The precedent that schools should send mailings to students to “inform” them of what they have to offer has been set, and in this competitive world of colleges vying for the most applications, I only see more mailings to come in the future. It’s strange that the college process is always presented as a competition between students to get into the same colleges. It seems that another battle is also happening, where colleges are competing for the applications of the students..

High school seniors aren’t stupid. Neither are admissions offices. Don’t seniors want to go to school somewhere where they will fit and thrive and not just somewhere that is selective and will look good? Don’t applications offices want a pool of people who truly believe they would thrive in that college’s environment, and not have to deal with the many who thought those guys tossing the frisbee in the picture on the postcard they sent them looked pretty cool? I think it’s time to rethink what applying to college really means, for the folks on both sides, before we hit the impending boom in competition that I see coming. And let’s start by eliminating these silly mailings. Maybe we as seniors would then follow suit and choose intelligently where to apply.

More from the New York Times:

“I wonder if Princeton should be poorer.”

If you’re a high school senior trying to seduce the admissions officer reading your application essay, this may not strike you as the ideal opening line. But Shanti Kumar, a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, went ahead anyway when the university prompted her to react in writing to the idea of “Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.”

Back in January, when I asked high school seniors to send in college application essays about money, class, working and the economy, I wasn’t sure what, if anything, would come in over the transom.

But 66 students submitted essays, and with the help of Harry Bauld, the author of “On Writing the College Application Essay,” we’ve selected four to publish in full online and in part in this column. That allowed us to be slightly more selective than Princeton itself was last year.

What these four writers have in common is an appetite for risk. Not only did they talk openly about issues that are emotionally complex and often outright taboo, but they took brave and counterintuitive positions on class, national identity and the application process itself. For anyone looking to inspire their own children or grandchildren who are seeking to go to college in the fall of 2014, these four essays would be a good place to start.

Perhaps the most daring essay of all came from Julian Cranberg, a 17-year-old from Brookline, Mass. One of the first rules of the college admissions process is that you don’t write about the college admissions process.

But Mr. Cranberg thumbed his nose at that convention, taking on the tremendous cost of the piles of mail schools send to potential students, and the waste that results from the effort. He figured that he received at least $200 worth of pitches in the past year or so.

“Why, in an era of record-high student loan debt and unemployment, are colleges not reallocating these ludicrous funds to aid their own students instead of extending their arms far and wide to students they have never met?” he asked in the essay.

Antioch College seemed to think that was a perfectly reasonable question and accepted him, though he will attend Oberlin College instead, to which he did not submit the essay.

“It’s a bold move to critique the very institution he was applying to,” said Mr. Bauld, who also teaches English at Horace Mann School in New York City. “But here’s somebody who knows he can make it work with intelligence and humor.”

Read the entire article here.

BigBang, tD, Technica

Law, Common Sense and Your DNA

Paradoxically the law and common sense often seem to be at odds. Justice may still be blind, at least in most open democracies, but there seems to be no question as to the stupidity of much of our law.

Some examples: in Missouri it’s illegal to drive with an uncaged bear in the car; in Maine, it’s illegal to keep Christmas decorations up after January 14th; in New Jersey, it’s illegal to wear a bulletproof vest while committing murder; in Connecticut, a pickle is not an official, legal pickle unless it can bounce; in Louisiana, you can be fined $500 for instructing a pizza delivery service to deliver pizza to a friend unknowingly.

So, today we celebrate a victory for common sense and justice over thoroughly ill-conceived and badly written law — the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down laws granting patents to corporations for human genes.

Unfortunately though, due to the extremely high financial stakes this is not likely to be the last we hear about big business seeking to patent or control the building blocks to life.

From the WSJ:

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that human genes isolated from the body can’t be patented, a victory for doctors and patients who argued that such patents interfere with scientific research and the practice of medicine.

The court was handing down one of its most significant rulings in the age of molecular medicine, deciding who may own the fundamental building blocks of life.

The case involved Myriad Genetics Inc., which holds patents related to two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, that can indicate whether a woman has a heightened risk of developing breast cancer or ovarian cancer.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, said the genes Myriad isolated are products of nature, which aren’t eligible for patents.

“Myriad did not create anything,” Justice Thomas wrote in an 18-page opinion. “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.”

Even if a discovery is brilliant or groundbreaking, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s patentable, the court said.

However, the ruling wasn’t a complete loss for Myriad. The court said that DNA molecules synthesized in a laboratory were eligible for patent protection. Myriad’s shares soared after the court’s ruling.

The court adopted the position advanced by the Obama administration, which argued that isolated forms of naturally occurring DNA weren’t patentable, but artificial DNA molecules were.

Myriad also has patent claims on artificial genes, known as cDNA.

The high court’s ruling was a win for a coalition of cancer patients, medical groups and geneticists who filed a lawsuit in 2009 challenging Myriad’s patents. Thanks to those patents, the Salt Lake City company has been the exclusive U.S. commercial provider of genetic tests for breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

“Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” said Sandra Park of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the groups challenging the patents. “Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued.”

Myriad didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The challengers argued the patents have allowed Myriad to dictate the type and terms of genetic screening available for the diseases, while also dissuading research by other laboratories.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Gene showing the coding region in a segment of eukaryotic DNA. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

tD

Innocent Until Proven Guilty, But Always Under Suspicion

It is strange to see the reaction to a remarkable disclosure such as that by the leaker / whistleblower Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency (NSA) peering into all our daily, digital lives. One strange reaction comes from the political left: the left desires a broad and activist government, ready to protect us all, but decries the NSA’s snooping. Another odd reaction comes from the political right: the right wants government out of people’s lives, but yet embraces the idea that the NSA should be looking for virtual skeletons inside people’s digital closets.

But let’s humanize this for a second. Somewhere inside the bowels of the NSA there is (or was) a person, or a small group of people, who actively determines what to look for in your digital communications trail. This person sets some parameters in a computer program and the technology does the rest, sifting through vast mountains of data looking for matches and patterns. Perhaps today that filter may have been set to contain certain permutations of data: zone of originating call, region of the recipient, keywords or code words embedded in the data traffic. However, tomorrow a rather zealous NSA employee may well set the filter to look for different items: keywords highlighting a particular political affiliation, preference for certain TV shows or bars, likes and dislikes of certain foods or celebrities.

We have begun the slide down a very dangerous, slippery slope that imperils our core civil liberties. The First Amendment protects our speech and assembly, but now we know that someone or some group may be evaluating the quality of that speech and determining a course of action if they disagree or if they find us assembling with others with whom they disagree. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable search — well, it looks like this one is falling by the wayside in light of the NSA program. We presume the secret FISA court, overseeing the secret program determines in secret what may or may not be deemed “reasonable”.

Regardless of Edward Snowden’s motivations (and his girl friend’s reaction), this event raises extremely serious issues that citizens must contemplate and openly discuss. It raises questions about the exercise of power, about government overreach and about the appropriate balance between security and privacy. It also raises questions about due process and about the long held right that presumes us to be innocent first and above all else. It raises a fundamental question about U.S. law and the Constitution and to whom it does and does not apply.

The day before the PRISM program exploded in the national consciousness only a handful of people — in secret — were determining answers to these constitutional and societal questions. Now, thanks to Mr.Snowden we can all participate in that debate, and rightly so — while being watched of course.

From Slate:

Every April, I try to wade through mounds of paperwork to file my taxes. Like most Americans, I’m trying to follow the law and pay all of the taxes that I owe without getting screwed in the process. I try and make sure that every donation I made is backed by proof, every deduction is backed by logic and documentation that I’ll be able to make sense of seven years. Because, like many Americans, I completely and utterly dread the idea of being audited. Not because I’ve done anything wrong, but the exact opposite. I know that I’m filing my taxes to the best of my ability and yet, I also know that if I became a target of interest from the IRS, they’d inevitably find some checkbox I forgot to check or some subtle miscalculation that I didn’t see. And so what makes an audit intimidating and scary is not because I have something to hide but because proving oneself to be innocent takes time, money, effort, and emotional grit.

Sadly, I’m getting to experience this right now as Massachusetts refuses to believe that I moved to New York mid-last-year. It’s mind-blowing how hard it is to summon up the paperwork that “proves” to them that I’m telling the truth. When it was discovered that Verizon (and presumably other carriers) was giving metadata to government officials, my first thought was: Wouldn’t it be nice if the government would use that metadata to actually confirm that I was in NYC, not Massachusetts? But that’s the funny thing about how data is used by our current government. It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.

The frameworks of “innocent until proven guilty” and “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” are really, really important to civil liberties, even if they mean that some criminals get away. These frameworks put the burden on the powerful entity to prove that someone has done something wrong. Because it’s actually pretty easy to generate suspicion, even when someone is wholly innocent. And still, even with this protection, innocent people are sentenced to jail and even given the death penalty. Because if someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s not impossible to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data.

It’s disturbing to me how often I watch as someone’s likeness is constructed in ways that contorts the image of who they are. This doesn’t require a high-stakes political issue. This is playground stuff. In the world of bullying, I’m astonished at how often schools misinterpret situations and activities to construct narratives of perpetrators and victims. Teens get really frustrated when they’re positioned as perpetrators, especially when they feel as though they’ve done nothing wrong. Once the stakes get higher, all hell breaks loose. In Sticks and Stones, Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon details how media and legal involvement in bullying cases means that they often spin out of control, such as they did in South Hadley. I’m still bothered by the conviction of Dharun Ravi in the highly publicized death of Tyler Clementi. What happens when people are tarred and feathered as symbols for being imperfect?

Of course, it’s not just one’s own actions that can be used against one’s likeness. Guilt-through-association is a popular American pastime. Remember how the media used Billy Carter to embarrass Jimmy Carter? Of course, it doesn’t take the media or require an election cycle for these connections to be made. Throughout school, my little brother had to bear the brunt of teachers who despised me because I was a rather rebellious student. So when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, it didn’t surprise me that the media went hogwild looking for any connection to the suspects. Over and over again, I watched as the media took friendships and song lyrics out of context to try to cast the suspects as devils. By all accounts, it looks as though the brothers are guilty of what they are accused of, but that doesn’t make their friends and other siblings evil or justify the media’s decision to portray the whole lot in such a negative light.

So where does this get us? People often feel immune from state surveillance because they’ve done nothing wrong. This rhetoric is perpetuated on American TV. And yet the same media who tells them they have nothing to fear will turn on them if they happen to be in close contact with someone who is of interest to—or if they themselves are the subject of—state interest. And it’s not just about now, but it’s about always.

And here’s where the implications are particularly devastating when we think about how inequality, racism, and religious intolerance play out. As a society, we generate suspicion of others who aren’t like us, particularly when we believe that we’re always under threat from some outside force. And so the more that we live in doubt of other people’s innocence, the more that we will self-segregate. And if we’re likely to believe that people who aren’t like us are inherently suspect, we won’t try to bridge those gaps. This creates societal ruptures and undermines any ability to create a meaningful republic. And it reinforces any desire to spy on the “other” in the hopes of finding something that justifies such an approach. But, like I said, it doesn’t take much to make someone appear suspect.

Read the entire article here.

Image: U.S. Constitution. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Idea Soup

PRISM

From the news reports first aired a couple of days ago and posted here, we now know the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has collected and is collecting vast amounts of data related to our phone calls. But, it seems that this is only the very tip of a very large, nasty iceberg. Our government is also sifting though our online communications as well — email, online chat, photos, videos, social networking data.

From the Washington Post:

Through a top-secret program authorized by federal judges working under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. intelligence community can gain access to the servers of nine Internet companies for a wide range of digital data. Documents describing the previously undisclosed program, obtained by The Washington Post, show the breadth of U.S. electronic surveillance capabilities in the wake of a widely publicized controversy over warrantless wiretapping of U.S. domestic telephone communications in 2005.

Read the entire article here.

Image: From the PRISM Powerpoint presentation – The PRISM program collects a wide range of data from the nine companies, although the details vary by provider. Courtesy of Washington Post.

Idea Soup, tD

Surveillance of the People for the People

The U.S. government is spying on your phone calls with the hushed assistance of companies like Verizon. While the National Security Agency (NSA) may not be listening to your actual conversations (yet), its agents are actively gathering data about your calls: who you call, from where you call, when you call, how long the call lasts.

Here’s the top secret court order delineating the government’s unfettered powers of domestic surveillance.

The price of freedom is becoming ever more expensive, and with broad clandestine activities like this underway — with no specific target — our precious freedoms continue to erode. Surely, this must delight our foes, who will gain relish from the self-inflicted curtailment of civil liberties — the societal consequences are much more far-reaching than those from any improvised explosive device (IED) however heinous and destructive.

From the Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government’s domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI’s request for its customers’ records, or the court order itself.

“We decline comment,” said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls”.

The order directs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order”. It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information”, such as “originating and terminating number”, the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information”.

The information is classed as “metadata”, or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such “metadata” is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

Read the entire article here.

Environs

Your State Bird

The official national bird of the United States is the Bald Eagle. For that matter, it’s also the official animal. Thankfully it was removed from the endangered species list a mere 5 years ago. Aside from the bird itself Americans love the symbolism that the eagle implies — strength, speed, leadership and achievement. But do Americans know their State bird. A recent article from the bird-lovers over at Slate will refresh your memory, and also recommend a more relevant alternative.

From Slate:

I drove over a bridge from Maryland into Virginia today and on the big “Welcome to Virginia” sign was an image of the state bird, the northern cardinal—with a yellow bill. I should have scoffed, but it hardly registered. Everyone knows that state birds are a big joke. There are a million cardinals, a scattering of robins, and just a general lack of thought put into the whole thing.

States should have to put more thought into their state bird than I put into picking my socks in the morning. “Ugh, state bird? I dunno, what’re the guys next to us doing? Cardinal? OK, let’s do that too. Yeah put it on all the signs. Nah, no time to research the bill color, let’s just go.” It’s the official state bird! Well, since all these jackanape states are too busy passing laws requiring everyone to own guns or whatever to consider what their state bird should be, I guess I’ll have to do it.

1. Alabama. Official state bird: yellowhammer

Right out of the gate with this thing. Yellowhammer? C’mon. I Asked Jeeves and it told me that Yellowhammer is some backwoods name for a yellow-shafted flicker. The origin story dates to the Civil War, when some Alabama troops wore yellow-trimmed uniforms. Sorry, but that’s dumb, mostly because it’s just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the actual bird. If you want a woodpecker, go for something with a little more cachet, something that’s at least a full species.

What it should be: red-cockaded woodpecker

2. Alaska. Official state bird: willow ptarmigan

Willow Ptarmigans are the dumbest-sounding birds on Earth, sorry. They sound like rejected Star Wars aliens, angrily standing outside the Mos Eisley Cantina because their IDs were rejected. Why go with these dopes, Alaska, when you’re the best state to see the most awesome falcon on Earth?

What it should be: gyrfalcon

3. Arizona. Official state bird: cactus wren

Cactus Wren is like the only boring bird in the entire state. I can’t believe it.

What it should be: red-faced warbler

4. Arkansas. Official state bird: northern mockingbird

Christ. What makes this even less funny is that there are like eight other states with mockingbird as their official bird. I’m convinced that the guy whose job it was to report to the state’s legislature on what the official bird should be forgot until the day it was due and he was in line for a breakfast sandwich at Burger King. In a panic he walked outside and selected the first bird he could find, a dirty mockingbird singing its stupid head off on top of a dumpster.

What it should be: painted bunting

5. California. Official state bird: California quail

… Or perhaps the largest, most radical bird on the continent?

What it should be: California condor

6. Colorado. Official state bird: lark bunting

I’m actually OK with this. A nice choice. But why not go with one of the birds that are (or are pretty much) endemic in your state?

What it should be: brown-capped rosy-finch or Gunnison sage-grouse

Read the entire article here.

Image: Bald Eagle, Kodiak Alaska, 2010. Courtesy of Yathin S Krishnappa / Wikipedia.

tD, Technica

Pain Ray

We humans are capable of the most sublime creations, from soaring literary inventions to intensely moving music and gorgeous works of visual art. This stands in stark and paradoxical contrast to our range of inventions that enable efficient mass destruction, torture and death. The latest in this sad catalog of human tools of terror is the “pain ray”, otherwise known by its military euphemism as an Active Denial weapon. The good news is that it only delivers intense pain, rather than death. How inventive we humans really are — we should be so proud.

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From the New Scientist:

THE pain, when it comes, is unbearable. At first it’s comparable to a hairdryer blast on the skin. But within a couple of seconds, most of the body surface feels roasted to an excruciating degree. Nobody has ever resisted it: the deep-rooted instinct to writhe and escape is too strong.

The source of this pain is an entirely new type of weapon, originally developed in secret by the US military – and now ready for use. It is a genuine pain ray, designed to subdue people in war zones, prisons and riots. Its name is Active Denial. In the last decade, no other non-lethal weapon has had as much research and testing, and some $120 million has already been spent on development in the US.

Many want to shelve this pain ray before it is fired for real but the argument is far from cut and dried. Active Denial’s supporters claim that its introduction will save lives: the chances of serious injury are tiny, they claim, and it causes less harm than tasers, rubber bullets or batons. It is a persuasive argument. Until, that is, you bring the dark side of human nature into the equation.

The idea for Active Denial can be traced back to research on the effects of radar on biological tissue. Since the 1940s, researchers have known that the microwave radiation produced by radar devices at certain frequencies could heat the skin of bystanders. But attempts to use such microwave energy as a non-lethal weapon only began in the late 1980s, in secret, at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The first question facing the AFRL researchers was whether microwaves could trigger pain without causing skin damage. Radiation equivalent to that used in oven microwaves, for example, was out of the question since it penetrates deep into objects, and causes cells to break down within seconds.

The AFRL team found that the key was to use millimetre waves, very-short-wavelength microwaves, with a frequency of about 95 gigahertz. By conducting tests on human volunteers, they discovered that these waves would penetrate only the outer 0.4 millimetres of skin, because they are absorbed by water in surface tissue. So long as the beam power was capped – keeping the energy per square centimetre of skin below a certain level – the tissue temperature would not exceed 55 °C, which is just below the threshold for damaging cells (Bioelectromagnetics, vol 18, p 403).

The sensation, however, was extremely painful, because the outer skin holds a type of pain receptor called thermal nociceptors. These respond rapidly to threats and trigger reflexive “repel” reactions when stimulated (see diagram).

To build a weapon, the next step was to produce a high-power beam capable of reaching hundreds of metres. At the time, it was possible to beam longer-wavelength microwaves over great distances – as with radar systems – but it was not feasible to use the same underlying technology to produce millimetre waves.

Working with the AFRL, the military contractor Raytheon Company, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, built a prototype with a key bit of hardware: a gyrotron, a device for amplifying millimetre microwaves. Gyrotrons generate a rotating ring of electrons, held in a magnetic field by powerful cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets. The frequency at which these electrons rotate matches the frequency of millimetre microwaves, causing a resonating effect. The souped-up millimetre waves then pass to an antenna, which fires the beam.

The first working prototype of the Active Denial weapon, dubbed “System 0”, was completed in 2000. At 7.5 tonnes, it was too big to be easily transported. A few years later, it was followed by mobile versions that could be carried on heavy vehicles.

Today’s Active Denial device, designed for military use, looks similar to a large, flat satellite dish mounted on a truck. The microwave beam it produces has a diameter of about 2 metres and can reach targets several hundred metres away. It fires in bursts of about 3 to 5 seconds.

Those who have been at the wrong end of the beam report that the pain is impossible to resist. “You might think you can withstand getting blasted. Your body disagrees quite strongly,” says Spencer Ackerman, a reporter for Wired magazine’s blog, Danger Room. He stood in the beam at an event arranged for the media last year. “One second my shoulder and upper chest were at a crisp, early-spring outdoor temperature on a Virginia field. Literally the next second, they felt like they were roasted, with what can be likened to a super-hot tingling feeling. The sensation causes your nerves to take control of your feeble consciousness, so it wasn’t like I thought getting out of the way of the beam was a good idea – I did what my body told me to do.” There’s also little chance of shielding yourself; the waves penetrate clothing.

Read the entire article here.

Related video courtesy of CBS 60 Minutes.

Environs

MondayMap: Intolerance and Hatred

A fascinating map of tweets espousing hatred and racism across the United States. The data analysis and map were developed by researchers at Humboldt State University.

From the Guardian:

[T]he students and professors at Humboldt State University who produced this map read the entirety of the 150,000 geo-coded tweets they analysed.

Using humans rather than machines means that this research was able to avoid the basic pitfall of most semantic analysis where a tweet stating ‘the word homo is unacceptable’ would still be classed as hate speech. The data has also been ‘normalised’, meaning that the scale accounts for the total twitter traffic in each county so that the final result is something that shows the frequency of hateful words on Twitter. The only question that remains is whether the views of US Twitter users can be a reliable indication of the views of US citizens.

See the interactive map and read the entire article here.

Idea Soup

What’s In a Name?

Recently we posted a fascinating story about a legal ruling in Iceland that allowed parents to set aside centuries of Icelandic history by naming their girl “Blaer” — a traditionally male name. You see Iceland has an official organization — the Iceland Naming Committee — that regulates and decides if a given name is acceptable (by Icelandic standards).

Well, this got us thinking about rules and conventions in other nations. For instance, New Zealand will not allow parents to name a child “Pluto”, however “Number 16 Bus Shelter” and “Violence” recently got the thumbs up. Some misguided or innovative (depending upon your perspective) New Zealanders have unsuccessfully tried to name their offspring: “*” (yes, asterisk), “.” (period or full-stop), “V”, and “Emperor”.

Not to be outdone, a U.S. citizen recently legally changed his name to “In God” (first name) “We Trust” (last name). Humans are indeed a strange species.

From CNN:

Lucifer cannot be born in New Zealand.

And there’s no place for Christ or a Messiah either.

In New Zealand, parents have to run by the government any name they want to bestow on their baby.

And each year, there’s a bevy of unusual ones too bizarre to pass the taste test.

The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages shared that growing list with CNN on Wednesday.

Four words:

What were they thinking?

In the past 12 years, the agency had to turn down not one, not two, but six sets of parents who wanted to name their child “Lucifer.”

Also shot down were parents who wanted to grace their child with the name “Messiah.” That happened twice.

“Christ,” too, was rejected.

Specific rules

As the agency put it, acceptable names must not cause offense to a reasonable person, not be unreasonably long and should not resemble an official title and rank.

It’s no surprise then that the names nixed most often since 2001 are “Justice” (62 times) and “King” (31 times).

Some of the other entries scored points in the creativity department — but clearly didn’t take into account the lifetime of pain they’d bring.

“Mafia No Fear.” “4Real.” “Anal.”

Oh, come on!

Then there were the parents who preferred brevity through punctuation. The ones who picked ‘”*” (the asterisk) or ‘”.”(period).

Slipping through

Still, some quirky names do make it through.

In 2008, the country made made international news when the naming agency allowed a set of twins to be named ‘

“Benson” and “Hedges” — a popular cigarette brand — and OK’d the names “Violence” and “Number 16 Bus Shelter.”

Asked about those examples, Michael Mead of the Internal Affairs Department (under which the agency falls) said, “All names registered with the Department since 1995 have conformed to these rules.”

And what happens when parents don’t conform?

Four years ago, a 9-year-old girl was taken away from her parents by the state so that her name could be changed from “Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii.”

Not alone

To be sure, New Zealand is not the only country to act as editor for some parent’s wacky ideas.

Sweden also has a naming law and has nixed attempts to name children “Superman,” “Metallica,” and the oh-so-easy-to-pronounce “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116.”

In 2009, the Dominican Republic contemplated banning unusual names after a host of parents began naming their children after cars or fruit.

In the United States, however, naming fights have centered on adults.

In 2008, a judge allowed an Illinois school bus driver to legally change his first name to “In God” and his last name to “We Trust.”

But the same year, an appeals court in New Mexico ruled against a man — named Variable — who wanted to change his name to “F— Censorship!”

Here is a list of some the names banned in New Zealand since 2001 — and how many times they came up

Justice:62

King:31

Princess:28

Prince:27

Royal:25

Duke:10

Major:9

Bishop:9

Majesty:7

J:6

Lucifer:6

using brackets around middle names:4

Knight:4

Lady:3

using back slash between names:8

Judge:3

Royale:2

Messiah:2

T:2

I:2

Queen:2

II:2

Sir:2

III:2

Jr:2

E:2

V:2

Justus:2

Master:2

Constable:1

Queen Victoria:1

Regal:1

Emperor:1

Christ:1

Juztice:1

3rd:1

C J :1

G:1

Roman numerals III:1

General:1

Saint:1

Lord:1

. (full stop):1

89:1

Eminence:1

M:1

VI:1

Mafia No Fear:1

2nd:1

Majesti:1

Rogue:1

4real:1

* (star symbol):1

5th:1

S P:1

C:1

Sargent:1

Honour:1

D:1

Minister:1

MJ:1

Chief:1

Mr:1

V8:1

President:1

MC:1

Anal:1

A.J:1

Baron:1

L B:1

H-Q:1

Queen V:1

Read the entire article following the jump.

Literature

Two Nations Divided by Book Covers

“England and America are two countries separated by the same language”. This oft used quote is usually attributed to Oscar Wilde or GBS (George Bernard Shaw). Regardless of who originated the phrase both authors would not be surprised to see that book covers are divided by the Atlantic Ocean as well. The Millions continues its fascinating annual comparative analysis.

American book covers on the left, British book covers on the right.

[div class=attrib]From The Millions:[end-div]

As we’ve done for several years now, we thought it might be fun to compare the U.S. and U.K. book cover designs of this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books contenders. Book cover art is an interesting element of the literary world — sometimes fixated upon, sometimes ignored — but, as readers, we are undoubtedly swayed by the little billboard that is the cover of every book we read. And, while many of us no longer do most of our reading on physical books with physical covers, those same cover images now beckon us from their grids in the various online bookstores. From my days as a bookseller, when import titles would sometimes find their way into our store, I’ve always found it especially interesting that the U.K. and U.S. covers often differ from one another. This would seem to suggest that certain layouts and imagery will better appeal to readers on one side of the Atlantic rather than the other. These differences are especially striking when we look at the covers side by side. The American covers are on the left, and the UK are on the right. Your equally inexpert analysis is encouraged in the comments.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article and see more book covers after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=atrrib]Book cover images courtesy of The Millions and their respective authors and publishers.[end-div]

BigBang, tD

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Naysayers would say that government, and hence taxpayer dollars, should not be used to fund science initiatives. After all academia and business seem to do a fairly good job of discovery and innovation without a helping hand pilfering from the public purse. And, without a doubt, and money aside, government funded projects do raise a number of thorny questions: On what should our hard-earned income tax be spent? Who decides on the priorities? How is progress to be measured? Do taxpayers get any benefit in return? After many of us cringe at the thought of an unelected bureaucrat or a committee of such spending millions if not billions of our dollars. Why not just spend the money on fixing our national potholes?

But despite our many human flaws and foibles we are at heart explorers. We seek to know more about ourselves, our world and our universe. Those who seek answers to fundamental questions of consciousness, aging, and life are pioneers in this quest to expand our domain of understanding and knowledge. These answers increasingly aid our daily lives through continuous improvement in medical science, and innovation in materials science. And, our collective lives are enriched as we increasingly learn more about the how and the why of our and our universe’s existence.

So, some of our dollars have gone towards big science at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beneath Switzerland looking for constituents of matter, the wild laser experiment at the National Ignition Facility designed to enable controlled fusion reactions, and the Curiosity rover exploring Mars. Yet more of our dollars have gone to research and development into enhanced radar, graphene for next generation circuitry, online courseware, stress in coral reefs, sensors to aid the elderly, ultra-high speed internet for emergency response, erosion mitigation, self-cleaning surfaces, flexible solar panels.

Now comes word that the U.S. government wants to spend $3 billion dollars — over 10 years — on building a comprehensive map of the human brain. The media has dubbed this the “connectome” following similar efforts to map our human DNA, the genome. While this is the type of big science that may yield tangible results and benefits only decades from now, it ignites the passion and curiosity of our children to continue to seek and to find answers. So, this is good news for science and the explorer who lurks within us all.

[div class=attrib]From ars technica:[end-div]

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the Obama administration is preparing to launch biology into its first big project post-genome: mapping the activity and processes that power the human brain. The initial report suggested that the project would get roughly $3 billion dollars over 10 years to fund projects that would provide an unprecedented understanding of how the brain operates.

But the report was remarkably short on the scientific details of what the studies would actually accomplish or where the money would actually go. To get a better sense, we talked with Brown University’s John Donoghue, who is one of the academic researchers who has been helping to provide the rationale and direction for the project. Although he couldn’t speak for the administration’s plans, he did describe the outlines of what’s being proposed and why, and he provided a glimpse into what he sees as the project’s benefits.

What are we talking about doing?

We’ve already made great progress in understanding the behavior of individual neurons, and scientists have done some excellent work in studying small populations of them. On the other end of the spectrum, decades of anatomical studies have provided us with a good picture of how different regions of the brain are connected. “There’s a big gap in our knowledge because we don’t know the intermediate scale,” Donaghue told Ars. The goal, he said, “is not a wiring diagram—it’s a functional map, an understanding.”

This would involve a combination of things, including looking at how larger populations of neurons within a single structure coordinate their activity, as well as trying to get a better understanding of how different structures within the brain coordinate their activity. What scale of neuron will we need to study? Donaghue answered that question with one of his own: “At what point does the emergent property come out?” Things like memory and consciousness emerge from the actions of lots of neurons, and we need to capture enough of those to understand the processes that let them emerge. Right now, we don’t really know what that level is. It’s certainly “above 10,” according to Donaghue. “I don’t think we need to study every neuron,” he said. Beyond that, part of the project will focus on what Donaghue called “the big question”—what emerges in the brain at these various scales?”

While he may have called emergence “the big question,” it quickly became clear he had a number of big questions in mind. Neural activity clearly encodes information, and we can record it, but we don’t always understand the code well enough to understand the meaning of our recordings. When I asked Donaghue about this, he said, “This is it! One of the big goals is cracking the code.”

Donaghue was enthused about the idea that the different aspects of the project would feed into each other. “They go hand in hand,” he said. “As we gain more functional information, it’ll inform the connectional map and vice versa.” In the same way, knowing more about neural coding will help us interpret the activity we see, while more detailed recordings of neural activity will make it easier to infer the code.

As we build on these feedbacks to understand more complex examples of the brain’s emergent behaviors, the big picture will emerge. Donaghue hoped that the work will ultimately provide “a way of understanding how you turn thought into action, how you perceive, the nature of the mind, cognition.”

How will we actually do this?

Perception and the nature of the mind have bothered scientists and philosophers for centuries—why should we think we can tackle them now? Donaghue cited three fields that had given him and his collaborators cause for optimism: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and optical tracers. We’ve now reached the point where, thanks to advances in nanotechnology, we’re able to produce much larger arrays of electrodes with fine control over their shape, allowing us to monitor much larger populations of neurons at the same time. On a larger scale, chemical tracers can now register the activity of large populations of neurons through flashes of fluorescence, giving us a way of monitoring huge populations of cells. And Donaghue suggested that it might be possible to use synthetic biology to translate neural activity into a permanent record of a cell’s activity (perhaps stored in DNA itself) for later retrieval.

Right now, in Donaghue’s view, the problem is that the people developing these technologies and the neuroscience community aren’t talking enough. Biologists don’t know enough about the tools already out there, and the materials scientists aren’t getting feedback from them on ways to make their tools more useful.

Since the problem is understanding the activity of the brain at the level of large populations of neurons, the goal will be to develop the tools needed to do so and to make sure they are widely adopted by the bioscience community. Each of these approaches is limited in various ways, so it will be important to use all of them and to continue the technology development.

Assuming the information can be recorded, it will generate huge amounts of data, which will need to be shared in order to have the intended impact. And we’ll need to be able to perform pattern recognition across these vast datasets in order to identify correlations in activity among different populations of neurons. So there will be a heavy computational component as well.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: White matter fiber architecture of the human brain. Courtesy of the Human Connectome Project.[end-div]

Environs, tD

From Sea to Shining Sea – By Rail

Now that air travel has become well and truly commoditized, and for most of us, a nightmare, it’s time, again, to revisit the romance of rail. After all, the elitist romance of air travel passed away about 40-50 years ago. Now all we are left with is parking trauma at the airport; endless lines at check in, security, the gate and while boarding and disembarking; inane airport announcements and beeping golf carts; coughing, tweeting passengers crammed shoulder to shoulder in far too small seats; poor quality air and poor quality service in the cabin. It’s even dangerous to open the shade and look out of the aircraft window for fear of waking a cranky neighbor, or, more calamitous still, for washing out the in-seat displays showing the latest reality TV videos.

Some of you, surely, still pine for a quiet and calming ride across the country taking in the local sights at a more leisurely pace. Alfred Twu, who helped define the 2008 high speed rail proposal for California, would have us zooming across the entire United States in trains, again. So, it not be a leisurely ride — think more like 200-300 miles per hour — but it may well bring us closer to what we truly miss when suspended at 30,000 ft. We can’t wait.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

I created this US High Speed Rail Map as a composite of several proposed maps from 2009, when government agencies and advocacy groups were talking big about rebuilding America’s train system.

Having worked on getting California’s high speed rail approved in the 2008 elections, I’ve long sung the economic and environmental benefits of fast trains.

This latest map comes more from the heart. It speaks more to bridging regional and urban-rural divides than about reducing airport congestion or even creating jobs, although it would likely do that as well.

Instead of detailing construction phases and service speeds, I took a little artistic license and chose colors and linked lines to celebrate America’s many distinct but interwoven regional cultures.

The response to my map this week went above and beyond my wildest expectations, sparking vigorous political discussion between thousands of Americans ranging from off-color jokes about rival cities to poignant reflections on how this kind of rail network could change long-distance relationships and the lives of faraway family members.

Commenters from New York and Nebraska talked about “wanting to ride the red line”. Journalists from Chattanooga, Tennessee (population 167,000) asked to reprint the map because they were excited to be on the map. Hundreds more shouted “this should have been built yesterday”.

It’s clear that high speed rail is more than just a way to save energy or extend economic development to smaller cities.

More than mere steel wheels on tracks, high speed rail shrinks space and brings farflung families back together. It keeps couples in touch when distant career or educational opportunities beckon. It calls to adventure and travel. It is duct tape and string to reconnect politically divided regions. Its colorful threads weave new American Dreams.

That said, while trains still live large in the popular imagination, decades of limited service have left some blind spots in the collective consciousness. I’ll address few here:

Myth: High speed rail is just for big city people.
Fact: Unlike airplanes or buses which must make detours to drop off passengers at intermediate points, trains glide into and out of stations with little delay, pausing for under a minute to unload passengers from multiple doors. Trains can, have, and continue to effectively serve small towns and suburbs, whereas bus service increasingly bypasses them.

I do hear the complaint: “But it doesn’t stop in my town!” In the words of one commenter, “the train doesn’t need to stop on your front porch.” Local transit, rental cars, taxis, biking, and walking provide access to and from stations.

Myth: High speed rail is only useful for short distances.
Fact: Express trains that skip stops allow lines to serve many intermediate cities while still providing some fast end-to-end service. Overnight sleepers with lie-flat beds where one boards around dinner and arrives after breakfast have been successful in the US before and are in use on China’s newest 2,300km high speed line.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: U.S. High Speed Rail System proposal. Alfred Twu created this map to showcase what could be possible.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Gun Deaths in the U.S

Despite the recent atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut, at the hands of a madman carrying an assault weapon, death by gun continues unabated in the United States. Yet, accurate statistics are hard to come by. So, Slate and the Twitter feed @GunDeaths are collecting data to put this in perspective. Just over a month has passed since 20 children and 7 adults were gunned-down at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And since then at least 1,019 more people have died at the hands of a gun in the United States. That’s more than most other civilized countries record in a decade.

You can follow the interactive chart as it is updated daily here; another 4 deaths just today, January 17, 2013. According to the map, North Dakota and Wyoming have been the best States to avoid getting shot — both have recorded no deaths from gun violence since mid-December.

[div class=attrib]Image: partial snapshot of Slate and @GunDeaths interactive graphic. Courtesy of Slate.[end-div]

Environs

Testosterone and the Moon

While the United States’ military makes no comment a number of corroborated reports suggest that the country had a plan to drop an atomic bomb on the moon during the height of the Cold War. Apparently, a Hiroshima-like explosion on our satellite would have been seen as a “show of force” by the Soviets. The shear absurdity of this Dr.Strangelove story makes it all the more real.

[div class=attrib]From the Independent:[end-div]

US Military chiefs, keen to intimidate Russia during the Cold War, plotted to blow up the moon with a nuclear bomb, according to project documents kept secret for for nearly 45 years.

The army chiefs allegedly developed a top-secret project called, ‘A Study of Lunar Research Flights’ – or ‘Project A119’, in the hope that their Soviet rivals would be intimidated by a display of America’s Cold War muscle.

According to The Sun newspaper the military bosses developed a classified plan to launch a nuclear weapon 238,000 miles to the moon where it would be detonated upon impact.

The planners reportedly opted for an atom bomb, rather than a hydrogen bomb, because the latter would be too heavy for the missile.

Physicist Leonard Reiffel, who says he was involved in the project, claims the hope was that the flash from the bomb would intimidate the Russians following their successful launching of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957.

The planning of the explosion reportedly included calculations by astronomer Carl Sagan, who was then a young graduate.

Documents reportedly show the plan was abandoned because of fears it would have an adverse effect on Earth should the explosion fail.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of NASA.[end-div]

Idea Soup

USANIT

Ever-present in Europe nationalism continues to grow as austerity measures across the continent catalyze xenophobia. And, now it’s spreading westwards across the Atlantic to the United States of America. Well, actually to be more precise nationalistic fervor is spreading to Texas. Perhaps in our lifetimes we’ll have to contend with USANIT — the United States of America Not Including Texas. Seventy-seven thousand Texans, so far, want the Lone Star to fly again across their nascent nation.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Less than a week after Barack Obama was re-elected president, a slew of petitions have appeared on the White House’s We the People site, asking for states to be granted the right to peacefully withdraw from the union.

On Tuesday, all but one of the 33 states listed were far from reaching the 25,000 signature mark needed to get a response from the White House. Texas, however, had gained more than 77,000 online signatures in three days.

People from other states had signed the Texas petition. Another petition on the website was titled: “Deport everyone that signed a petition to withdraw their state from the United States of America.” It had 3,536 signatures.

The Texas petition reads:

Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it’s citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

Activists across the country have advocated for independent statehood since the union was restored after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Texas has been host to some of the most fervent fights for independence.

Daniel Miller is the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, which supports Texan independence and has its own online petition.

“We want to be able to govern ourselves without having some government a thousand-plus miles away that we have to go ask ‘mother may I’ to,” Miller said. “We want to protect our political, our cultural and our economic identities.”

Miller is not a fan of the word “secession”, because he views it as an over-generalization of what his group hopes to accomplish, but he encourages advocates for Texan independence to show their support when they can, including by signing the White House website petition.

“Given the political, cultural and economic pressures the United States is under, it’s not beyond the pale where one could envision the break up of the United States,” he said. “I don’t look at it as possibility, I look at it as an inevitability.”

Miller has been working for Texas independence for 16 years. He pointed to last week’s federal elections as evidence that a state independence movement is gaining traction. Miller pointed to the legalization of the sale of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, disobeying federal mandate.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]State Flag of Texas courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Declining and Disparate Life Expectancy in the U.S

Social scientists are not certain of the causes but the sobering numbers speak for themselves: life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma is 74 years, while that for women with at least a college degree is 84 years; for white men the comparable life expectancies are 66 years versus 80 years.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.

“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.

The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Your Proximity to Fast Food

A striking map that shows how close or far you are from a McDonalds. If you love fast food then the Eastern U.S. is the place for you. On the other hand, if you crave McDistance, then you may want to move to the Nevada desert, the wilds of Idaho, the Rocky Mountains or the plains of the Dakotas. The map is based on 2009 data.

[div class=attrib]Read more details about this cool map after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Map courtesy of Guardian / Stephen Von Worley, Data Pointed.[end-div]

Idea Soup

GDP of States Versus Countries

A niffty or neat (depending upon your location) map courtesy of Frank Jacobs over at Strange Maps. This one shows countries in place of U.S. States where the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is similar. For instance, Canada replaces Texas in the United States map since Canada’s entire GDP matches the economy of Texas. The map is based on data for 2007.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]