Ring... ring... ring

 

Wednesday tidbits

Calling for an end to voter suppression and insecure elections.

Unearthing the atrocities of the Holocaust without disturbing the ground.

Unearthing the dirt on Trump.

Wind turbines without blades.

Incoming water wars.

Thar's gold in them thar hills!  Or cell phones....

Thanks, Bill Nye.

Bits and bobs

If Norman Rockwell were painting today.

11 Ways to Solve Rape Better than Nail Polish

You Can Now Access All Of Richard Feynman's Physics Lectures For Free

Dry weather helps see more of Stonehenge's past.

Tom Tomorrow.

That's me when...

Fake cell phone towers!

When a Child Kills.

Hacking nude photos.

Women helping change history.

Sexual Objectification: What It Is, Why It's Damaging, And How We Change It

Lots of rules for women.

Have a cat burrito.

States' rights ... and wrongs

You go, Georgia!

A Georgia man panicked parents and children at a local park and baseball field by randomly walking around and displaying his gun to anyone he encountered in the parking lot. According to witnesses who spoke with WSB-TV, the man wandered around the Forsythe County park last Tuesday night showing his gun to strangers, telling them “there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Just what exactly did you think would happen when you pass these kinds of laws? That people would behave in a civilized manner?  Really?

You go, South Carolina!

SC GOP candidate: Women cause ’95 percent’ of divorces by loving their kids too much

And

SC Republican wants to end public schools: Nothing ‘in the Bible about state education’

And you go, Tennessee!

TENNESSEE PASSES BILL ALLOWING THE BULLYING OF LGBT STUDENTS IN THE NAME OF ‘RELIGIOUS FREEDOM’

You go, Alabama!

Alabama’s chief justice: Buddha didn’t create us so First Amendment only protects Christians

You go, New York!

 NYC cyclist arrested for using cellphone to film cop, told iPhones are ‘being used as guns’

Nom nom *bzzzap* nom *frittzzzz* ...

Crazy ants are attacking your electronics!

They have an app for that...

Surviving an earthquake... and dealing with the shock and wounds.

Now if we could just get animals to report in when they hear the earthquake coming....

Blog sprinkles

I always KNEW they were trashy rodents!

• Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado

• Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blog.

• Great Britain in winter!

• Sunk Australia WWII hospital ship Centaur: first images

It's what you scream as you see it sail past? PHAaaaa!!! There are currently 1091 known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids.

• Power Your Cellphone Off Coca-Cola

• You say El Nino, I say La Nina, let's call the whole thing off ... El Nino, La Nina

Hello?

Blog sprinkles

To help you figure out why billowing smoke is coming out of the computer tower vents...


click to embiggen..

And speaking of fires, California could use this information from Bryan of Why Now? The real hazards of wood ash after a burn.


Look forward, not back! There's nothing to see or learn from, really! No investigations are needed!

Steve Benen muses that Obama must really hate Bush:

I've been trying, however, to think about this from Obama's perspective. Bush left him with a generational economic crisis, an abysmal job market, a budget mess, a war in Iraq, a deteriorating war in Afghanistan, an nuclear-armed and unstable Pakistan, a nuclear-armed and nutty North Korea, a warming planet, a collapsing U.S. auto industry, an ineffective health care system, a massive debt, an absurd national energy framework, and a nation that has lost much of its global prestige.

Ready to dive in and start getting the nation back on track, the president is told, "Wait, before you tackle this to-do list, we have to deal with the consequences of the previous administration's alleged war crimes, too."

It's no wonder No Drama Obama prefers to turn the proverbial page.

I still wonder what happened to Riverbend of Baghdad Burning.

Matt Taibbi:

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Cell phones are rotting our brains!

One man's trash.... makes a neat house!

Too many pennies!

Mentioned in comments somewhere:

The Chemists Drinking Song
Words by : John A. Carroll (inspired by Isaac Asimov) Tune of : The Irish Washerwoman

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Sodium citrate, ammonium cyanide,
Mix 'em together and add some benzene,
And top off the punch with trichloroethylene.

Got gassed up last night with some furfuryl alcohol, Followed it up with a gallon of propanol, Tanked up on hydrazine 'til after noon, Then spit on the floor and blew up the saloon.

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Powdered aluminum, nitrogen iodide, Chlorates, permanganates, nitrates galore, Just swallow one drink and you'll never need more.

Whiskey, tequila, and rum are too tame. No, the stuff that I drink must explode into flame, When I breathe and dissolve all the paint in the room, And rattle the walls in a ground-shaking boom.

Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Go soak your head in a good strong insecticide, Slosh it around and impregnate your brain, With dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.

Just let the mothers at the Mom And Me group have at him.

And ... ew? ....

Orlando, FL (AHN) - The unknown animal found inside a can of Diet Pepsi drank by a man from Ormond Beach, Florida last July was a frog or toad, the Food and Drug Administration has confirmed after testing the product.

Blog sprinkles

The trolls among us.

What it means when we hear that Greenland is melting faster than expected..

Hugh Hefner's girlfriends through the ages.

Stats on the folding of the newspapers.. rather crumpling.

Paleontologists visit the Creation Museum:

"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.

This makes way too much sense:

The European Union has reached an agreement with all major mobile phone manufacturers to produce a common phone charger. Apart from reducing the frustration of customers juggling incompatible chargers, proponents say the agreement will encourage recycling and reduce electronic waste.

Of course the scientist was a MAN...

Daily sex makes for healthier sperm

Our very own Iraqi death squads. Bush and Cheney should be proud.

OMG:

"The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary."—Michael Scheuer on Glenn Beck's show

Adam Serwer at Tapped:

This is the same Michael Scheuer who, a few months ago, played patriotism police arguing that anyone who didn't support the United States using torture to interrogate terrorist suspects was anti-American...now he's begging for a terrorist attack on the United States. This is a pretty awesome example of how the right conflates their political interests with the interests of the country as a whole. If there's no terrorist attack, then Americans are safe. But Scheuer can't be right if there's no terrorist attack. And Scheuer being right is actually more important than Americans staying alive.

Torture apologists have tiptoed around the edge of this argument without actually saying so for some time, Leon Panetta walked back his observation about Dick Cheney, that "it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point," but as Scheuer and Beck proved yesterday, this is really how some people feel.

This gets to the essential creepiness about Beck's emotional display introducing his whole 9/12 project--the man wasn't weeping because he wished the country was as "unified" as it was after 9/11, he was weeping because the country is no longer in a such a state of petrified fear that it will acquiesce to whatever extreme measures the right deems necessary. Beck wasn't crying for the country, he was crying for himself, crying because people are no longer frightened enough to agree with everything he has to say. Understand, he only wants to hurt you because he loves you.

Have they thought this through?

Who says people wouldn't put these devices elsewhere than in cars?

Cincinatti, OH (AHN) - A UPS delivery driver turned inventor has come up with technology that blocks a driver from using a cell phone.

Inventor Fred Wenz and a partner have a provisional patent on a device that blocks cell phone signals within a 5-foot radius. The pair formed the company Try Safety First and are reportedly seeking investment capital to begin production of the device with an estimated $10 retail price.

Wenz reportedly began working on the device after becoming upset over the growing number of drivers who were paying more attention to cell phone conversations than they were to their driving and who became safety hazards.

The device was patterned after technology that prevents a drunk driver from driving.

However, critics say that the 5-foot radius is too large and that in many cars it would block passengers in the back seat from making cell phone calls and it could even interfere with occupants in another car that pulled alongside at a stop light.

More:

While on a run a few years ago, he came up with the idea for a device that blocks cell signals around a driver's seat. It's modeled on ignition locks that make a convicted drunken driver blow into an alcohol tester before the car will run.

"I witness it every day on the road, and I just thought, 'There has to be a way that you can prevent this electronically,' " says Wenz, 40.

Wenz and longtime friend John Fischer have formed Try Safety First and filed a provisional patent on what they call the owner compliance key (or OCK) late last year.

The device blocks signals to and from cellphones for a 5-foot radius, effectively the space around a driver's seat. It also can be set to be effective only on a secondary key, such as one a parent gives a teen.

Is this device designed only for functioning in cars? Or for ten dollars would we see people putting these all over the place? Shut down cell phone access in a place you want to rob, say? Deliberately mess with cell phone talkers in elevators? Teenager's rooms?

They also need to address this:

There is also the issue of the 1934 federal law that bans jamming commercial radio signals, including cellular transmissions. But the duo say their safety argument is strong enough to merit an exemption – much like the television industry was granted in 1996 for the v-chip, which lets parents block inappropriate content for their children.

And experts disagree over whether talking on a cell is enough of a distraction to merit a legal ban - especially when the overall number of accidents is declining. But that is exactly why Wenz and Fischer believe their product is the perfect solution.

But in addition to trying to secure funding, Wenz and Fischer are lobbying to have their technology made mandatory in all U.S. vehicles, a novel yet time-consuming approach to creating demand. They have had audiences with several regulatory agencies as well as U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate minority leader. The strategy is to get regulations in place to require automakers to include such technology in new cars, thereby instantly creating customers.

Fischer acknowledges it has been slow going, especially with U.S. automakers, even though he proposes selling it as an option at first for $99, which he says could net General Motors as much as $1 billion in extra revenue a year. At the same time, auto industry has presented other technologies, most notably the hands-free Sync system created by Ford in conjunction with Microsoft.

Wouldn't enforcement and heavy fines for cell phone usage while driving do the trick? Traffic school for the parents as well as the teen? Removal of a driver's license for the under 20 crowd? Make it an emphatic part of the driver's ed program?

I'd rather be able to call in an emergency such as a collision than try to figure out that the car I've been hit by has one of these devices shutting off my 911 calls....

But we KNOW you listened to this ad!

So you obviously want to buy our product!

A company called IMMI is perfecting software that goes in your cell phone and catches every snippet of audio you're exposed to, then automatically determines which ads you heard. And more!

To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI's data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain.

"We follow the same person from end to end," says Tom Zito, IMMI's chief executive.

I would recommend that IMMI start working on developing a cute, non-threatening mascot right now, because they are frankly talking about some scary shit. People volunteer to carry these phones for just $50 a month.

You might want to keep your cell phone in the fridge...

Or between some lead bars...

Post hijacked from Bruce Schneier from Schneier On Security:

A service called World Tracker lets you use data from cell phone towers and GPS systems to pinpoint anyone’s exact whereabouts, any time — as long as they’ve got their phone on them.

All you have to do is log on to the web site and enter the target phone number. The site sends a single text message to the phone that requires one response for confirmation. Once the response is sent, you are locked in to their location and can track them step-by-step. The response is only required the first time the phone is contacted, so you can imagine how easily it could be handled without the phone’s owner even knowing.

Once connected, the service shows you the exact location of the phone by the minute, conveniently pinpointed on a Google Map. So far, the service is only available in the UK, but the company has indicated plans to expand its service to other countries soon.

[...]

Dozens of programs are available that’ll turn any cell phone into a high-tech, long-range listening device. And the scariest part? They run virtually undetectable to the average eye.

Take, for example, Flexispy. The service promises to let you “catch cheating wives or cheating husbands” and even “bug meeting rooms.” Its tools use a phone’s microphone to let you hear essentially any conversations within earshot. Once the program is installed, all you have to do is dial a number to tap into the phone’s mic and hear everything going on. The phone won’t even ring, and its owner will have no idea you are virtually there at his side.

Ring a little harder, dear

I can't hear you...
This just in: Rudy Giuliani will not be taking any more cellphone calls from his wife -- or anyone -- during speeches.

"I have become technologically more proficient," Giuliani admitted this evening during a conversation on the Fox New Channel's "Hannity & Colmes." "I figured out how to put it on vibrate ... If anybody is offended by it, I won't do it again."

Just so you are aware old cell phones still can be used

To call 911. I keep some of our old ones with their car chargers in our cars for emergencies:

CARPENTERSVILLE, Ill., July 5 Emergency dispatchers in Carpentersville, Ill., say a child playing with a deactivated cell phone dialed 911 emergency 287 times.

QuadCom emergency center dispatchers said the 4-year-old girl eventually gave out her address when a dispatcher agreed to fill her McDonald's order, the Elgin (Ill.) Courier-News reported Thursday.

However, the center sent police to the home instead of cheeseburgers.

Federal Communications Commission regulations require deactivated cell phones to retain 911 capability -- a feature the child's mother said she was unaware of, the newspaper said. However, since the phone was deactivated, it did not give out a return phone number or other information when the 911 calls were made.

OMG! Turn off that cell phone or we'll never eat again!

Actually.... cellphones are not causing bees to quit their hives. (But did the scientists study the stupid topics of conversation? Being forced to listen would make anybody quit their jobs.):



The Independent:

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."

Spiegel Online:

Physicist Jochen Kuhn and his colleagues in Landau have studied the influence of high-frequency radiation on bee populations for years. In two pilot studies -- the latest one came out in 2006 -- the researchers just wanted to learn if there was any potentially bad effect at all. They arrived at a cautious conclusion, namely that bees exposed to strong radiation had a harder time flying back to their hives than unexposed bees. "Honeycomb area and mass showed a disadvantageous trend for the radiated bees," said Kuhn in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, "with no statistical significance."

Mobile vs. cordless phones

High-frequency radiation? Electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile-phone towers are high-frequency radiation. But that alone can't explain the bee deaths, because Kuhn's team used a base station for DECT telephones as a radiation source -- and DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) signals are used for cordless phones at home, not for mobile phones. "DECT and GSM (for mobile phones) use a number of different frequencies and a number of different modulation- and pulse-processes," Kuhn says. "We still don't know whether these (signals) have even a potential effect on bees. And, if they do, we don't know which ones.[snip] Basically they stuffed a DECT base station inside the hive, exposing the bees to an extreme not-found-in-nature radiation level.

The debate over the causes of bee deaths on both sides of the Atlantic has focused on a number of suspects:

• The American "Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group" has discussed something called "the AIDS of the bee industry." But it's not clear to anyone whether the busy insects might be suffering from a new, unknown sexual infection or a known one.
• Bacteria from genetically modified crops could affect the bees' intestinal surfaces and make them vulnerable, according to Hans Hinrich Kaatz from the University of Halle, in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE.
• Manfred Hederer, President of the German Beekeepers Association, told SPIEGEL that he believed the bees were dying from "some kind of poison, a certain active agent, which we have not discovered."
• Climate change is also on the list. Global warming has changed growth and blossoming periods of plants in many parts of the world, which in turn can influence animals.
• And now "mobile phone radiation" should be added to the list, or -- as The Scotsman put it over the weekend -- "emissions from mobile phone towers."

One last theory: Overcultivation

Jürgen Tautz, a bee researcher at the University of Würzburg, is sceptical about the mobile-phone theory but still calls it "worth researching." It's known, he says, that honeybees are "react with extreme sensitivity to changes in the earth's magnetic field." Tautz plans to let a working group he's organized study the question of whether some unpleasant interaction might exist between radio networks and honeycombs.

[snip]

But it's still a matter of debate whether the bees are healthy and unstressed. Professional beekeepers have warned for years about rising problems in their colonies:

• Varroa mite disease, from Asia, with the discouraging Latin name varroa destructor, has threatened European bee populations for over 20 years.
• Because farmers spray wildflowers as weeds and prefer monoculture -- planting the same crops year after year on a given plot of land -- the bees' range of nutritional food has shrunk.
• Beekeepers also list the introduction of so-called green genetic engineering as a potential problem. But the actual acreage of these open-air experiments in Germany represents less than 0.1 percent of the nation's total cultivated area.

Another explanation -- one not unknown among apiarists -- may be even more important. Tautz believes that intensive beekeeping may itself be one of the main problems. Raising dense colonies of bees narrows the genetic pool for a population, and less genetic variation weakens any species. In Turkey, where bees haven't been cultivated as intensely as they have in Germany, for example, mass deaths like the ones observed now in Europe and the United States would be unimaginable.

Update: John Blatchford has a good overview of what is going on in the United States and Europe and offers a discussion thread.

Update: Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake has more.

Go ahead and make that cell phone call

But playing your CD player might make Grandma go all funny:

WASHINGTON -- Calls made on cellphones do not affect hospital medical devices, US researchers said yesterday, but store antitheft alarms may make implanted heart devices misfire.

Tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., showed that normal use of cellphones caused no noticeable interference with patient care equipment, researchers said.

But a portable CD player caused an abnormal electrocardiographic reading when a patient used it near the device, according to one report in the March issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

At least two reports suggest that anti theft devices set up near the doors of retail stores can cause implantable rhythm devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators to malfunction.

Most hospitals forbid the use of cellphones. But Dr. David Hayes and colleagues said their tests suggest the ban is unmerited. They tested cellphones using two different technologies from different carriers, switching them on near 192 different medical devices.

Your cell phone can be called up as a witness

"The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.

Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set."