As usual, my thanks to the crack wranglers for rounding up these nows, particularly during my recent wedding vows:  Autonomous urban assault vehicles… 3 tons food / .1 acre / year… Migrant workers spread extreme drug resistant TB… A tourista’s guide to getting AIDS from Hatian men… Chinese economy consuming more growing less… Multiculturalism making young Muslims more radical… Silicon Valley “recovers” by gutting life support…  Polar and space inflatables… Cohen’s postmortum sperm impregnates woman he never met… Water from air… EU Parliament “Far Right” faction would have been banned in Austria… Stonehenge discovery… Multitudes of virus engineers by 2020… Second largest oil field collapsing faster than anticipated…

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  “In 2007, TerraMax will be back in action for DARPA’s Urban Challenge, the agency’s third contest of autonomous vehicles. This time, teams must master the obstacles of city streets. DARPA will again award more than $2 million in prizes to the finalists, and it’s already granted $1 million to TerraMax for development in this upcoming challenge.”

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  Urban homesteaders grow 3 tons of food each year on 1/10th of an acre.

See also “path to freedom”.

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  “More than a year after a virulent strain of tuberculosis killed 52 of 53 infected patients in a rural South African hospital, experts here and abroad say the disease has most likely spread to neighboring countries, and some say urgent action is essential to halt its advance.”

  [...]

  “Since it was first detected last year in KwaZulu-Natal Province, bordering the Indian Ocean, additional cases [of XDR-TB] have been found at 39 hospitals in South Africa’s other eight provinces. In interviews on Friday, several epidemiologists and TB experts said the disease had probably moved into Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique - countries that share borders and migrant work forces with South Africa - and perhaps to Zimbabwe, which sends hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees to and from South Africa each year.”

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  “With just three months to go before the French presidential elections, the French Socialist Party Saturday barred regional party leader Georges Freche over racist remarks against black players in the French national football team.”

  “A party commission decided to exclude the head of the party in the Mediterranean Languedoc-Roussillon region after he said publicly that ‘nine of 11 players in our national football team are black’.”

  “Freche, 68, had said ‘three or four’ black players would have been a normal proportion.”

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  Great article encouraging Western women to visit the Third World for sex tourism. What’s the downside to a little casual sex with a native Haitian?

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  “A US-based Jewish foundation held a Holocaust seminar for Croatian teachers, Thursday, to help them present the era effectively to their pupils. Stories of Anne Frank, Oscar Schindler and Croats who saved Jews during World War II were retold in the seminar, organized by the New York-based Jewish Foundation of the Righteous.”

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  “Space.com is covering NASA’s commemoration of the Apollo 1 crew & the last shuttle crews of both the Challenger and Columbia orbiters. The Apollo 1 crew was lost forty years ago yesterday to a fire while testing their spacecraft on a launch pad.”

  “From the article:”

  ‘While the nearly two decades separating NASA’s three space disasters allowed room for the agency to grow complacent, the relatively short time between the 2003 loss of Columbia and the end of the shuttle program could avoid a repeat of such behavior.’

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  “TANGIER, Morocco—From the bustling waterfront of this African port city, Europe appears tantalizingly close: The coast of Spain shows on the horizon just nine miles away. Despite decades of dreaming, no one has been able to bridge the physical divide that opened between the two continents more than 5 million years ago, forming the geological bottleneck to the Mediterranean Sea.”

  “In recent months, however, the governments of Morocco and Spain have taken significant steps to move forward with plans to bore a railroad under the muddy bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar. If built, the project would rank among the world’s most ambitious and complex civil engineering feats, alongside the Panama Canal and the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.”

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  “Greenland, or why you might care about ice physics”

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  “IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.”

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  “Luzius Wildhaber, 69, an internationally known Swiss lawyer, has become seriously ill after his trip to Russia, popular Austrian newspaper Die Presse reports. The former President of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the Swiss judge Luzius Wildhaber, does not exclude to have been poisoned during his trip to Russia at the end of October.”

  [...]

  “Swiss lawyer Karl Eckstein, who had accompanied Wildhaber on the last day of the Russia trip, fell ill with similar symptoms”

  [...]

  “The Human Rights court in Strasbourg stood several times in conflict with the Russian government, among the rest, because of violation of human rights in Chechnya”

  [...]

  “In Austria the lawyer had become known as one of ‘Thre Wise Men’ in connection with the ending of the EU-14 sanctions in 2000, Die Presse adds. The `sanctions’ were imposed by the heads of governments of the other 14 EU members decided to cease cooperation with the Austrian government because of coalition with Austrian Fredom Party (FPO), considered as right-wing extremists.”

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  “China required 4.3 times as much energy as America in 2005 to produce one unit of GDP, up from 3.4 times in 2002. It can be argued that much of China’s new investment has not yet reached optimal efficiency. That may be true, but it does not explain why things are getting worse: China consumed 15% more energy per unit of GDP in 2005 than it did in 2002. India, also a rapidly expanding economy, consumes only 61% as much energy as China per unit of GDP.”

  “China’s wasteful growth has brought joy to commodity producers and their bankers and shareholders worldwide. With rising profitability and stock prices, they have been happily expanding mining operations and acquiring or merging with rivals. But there are reasons to believe that the surge in commodity prices worldwide has run out of steam.”

  “There is strong evidence that the current cycle of China’s investment-led growth has peaked. A clear sign of overheating is the increase in accounts receivable. Although sales appear robust, Chinese firms are beginning to find it difficult to get paid in cash, either because their buyers cannot turn over their own stocks fast enough or because they have trouble borrowing money to finance their purchases.”

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  “The doctrine of multi-culturalism has alienated an entire generation of young Muslims and made them increasingly radical, a report has found.”

  “In stark contrast with their parents, growing numbers sympathise with extreme teachings of Islam, with almost four in ten wanting to live under Sharia law in Britain.”

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  “Charles Simonyi, the chief executive of Intentional Software, a start-up in Bellevue, Wash., believes that there is another way. He wants to overthrow conventional coding for something he calls “intentional programming,” in which programmers would talk to machines as little as possible. Instead, they would concentrate on capturing the intentions of computer users.”

  “Mr. Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft, is arguably the most successful pure programmer in the world, with a personal fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $1 billion. There may be richer programmer-billionaires - Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry Page of Google come to mind - but they became rich by founding and managing technology ventures; Mr. Simonyi rose mainly by writing code.”

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  “Silicon Valley, ever subject to boom-bust cycles, has returned to prosperity after a five-year downturn.”

  [...]

  “Globalization is helping to expand the valley’s economy, rather than threatening it, according to the 2007 Silicon Valley Index, produced by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a public-private partnership.”

  [...]

  “The report also pointed to some of the region’s perennial woes, with education, housing and income disparity entrenched than ever.”

  “The area’s high-school graduation rate fell 3 percent in 2005-06, its second drop in as many years. The percentage of graduates qualified to enter California’s four-year universities also fell. Meanwhile, education attainment disparities between races and ethnic groups remained.”

  [...]

  “Employer health insurance coverage declined, with 5 percent fewer workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties receiving insurance through their jobs. “Companies won’t be the big paternal parent anymore,” Hancock said. “The new model is to stay lean and contract out for everything, find specialists who are really good at one thing and pay them a lot of money to do it. It’s happening throughout Silicon Valley.”“

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  ‘At a time when the US Congress is to re-examine immigration issues, President George W Bush has made a strong case for increasing the H1-B visa quota, emphasising that it makes “no sense” for America to not allow an Indian scientist to come to the country and develop new technologies.’

  ‘Speaking in Delaware at a Dupont facility, Bush said, “It makes no sense to say to a young scientist from India, you can’t come to America to help this company develop technologies that help us deal with our problems. So we’ve got to change that .. Change that mindset in Washington DC.” Bush asserted it was in American interest to let skilled manpower work in the US and increase the number of visas.”’

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  “Inflatable Habitats for Polar and Space Colonists”

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  “Researchers at Rice University have created a mathematical model that helps build the argument that evolution doesn’t proceed solely through breeding and genetic mutations. Rather, organisms also swap large sections of DNA.”

  “The study, published in the January edition of Physics Today, sheds additional light on one of the enduring mysteries of evolution, namely it’s seemingly accelerating rate of change. Fossil records indicate that single-cell life forms emerged 3.5 billion years ago and then it took 2.5 billion years for multicell organisms to appear. Animals, plants and birds then took only 1 billion years to develop.”

  “A principal factor in this acceleration is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), according to Michael Deem, the John W. Cox Professor in Biochemical and Genetic Engineering and a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. In HGT, an organism will give (or exchange) large chunks of its own genetic material to another in a process that can be described as a naturally occurring gene graft.”

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  “In a precedent-setting decision, an Israeli court has ruled that a dead soldier’s family can have his sperm impregnated into the body of a woman he never met.”

  “Keivan Cohen, 20, was shot dead in 2002 by a Palestinian sniper in the Gaza Strip. He was single and left no will. But at the urging of his parents, a sample of his sperm was taken two hours after his death and has been stored in a hospital since.”

  [...]

  “Irit Rosenblum, a family rights advocate who represented the Cohen family, said the ruling was significant because it set a precedent for those seeking to continue bloodlines after death.”

Good for the Chosen that they can speak openly about continuing the bloodline of their priest class (Cohen). Too bad we’re frowned upon for saying the equivalent.

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  “ghostcorps recommends a writeup in The Australian by columnist Phillip Adams about a new windmill design that extracts water from air. The article gives few details of how it works, because patent protection is not yet in place, but what is revealed sounds promising.”

  “[Max] Whisson’s design has many blades, each as aerodynamic as an aircraft wing, and each employing ‘lift’ to get the device spinning… They don’t face into the wind like a conventional windmill; they’re arranged vertically, within an elegant column, and take the wind from any direction… The secret of Max’s design is how his windmills, whirring away in the merest hint of a wind, cool the air as it passes by… With three or four of Max’s magical machines on hills at our farm we could fill the tanks and troughs, and weather the drought. One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city’s water supply. And plonk a few hundred in marginal outback land - specifically to water tree-lots - and you could start to improve local rainfall.”

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  “A prominent Austrian Jewish leader on Tuesday condemned the European Parliament’s new far-right faction as racist and anti-Semitic, saying it would likely have been banned in Austria.”

  “Earlier this month, some of Europe’s most high-profile far-right politicians united in a new political grouping that brings together some big names from the far right of European politics, including France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Italy’s wartime Fascist leader. Andreas Moelzer, a member of Austria’s rightist Freedom Party, is also a member.”

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  “In a landmark ruling in favor of bloggers and cyber journalists, a Santa Clara County Court defended the First Amendment rights of online journalists to protect their confidential sources, effectively giving web journalists the same protections afforded to traditional print journalists.”

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  “The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.”

  “Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.”

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  “New excavations near Stonehenge have uncovered hearths, timbers and other remains of what archaeologists say was probably the village of workers who erected the brooding monoliths on Salisbury Plain in England.”

  “The archaeologists announced today that the 4,600-year-old ruins appear to form the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain. The houses at the site known as Durrington Walls were constructed in the same period that Stonehenge, less than two miles away, was built as a religious center presumably for worshippers of the Sun and their ancestors.”

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  “Dr. Rees is not a knee-jerk technophobe - he expects great advances as researchers around the world link their knowledge - but he fears that progress will be undone by what he calls the new global village idiots. He’s sure enough of himself to post an offer on Long Bets, a clever innovation on the Web that Stewart Brand helped start with money from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.”

  [...]

  “Five years ago, Dr. Rees posted this prediction: “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” He reasoned that “by 2020 there will be thousands - even millions - of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster. My concern is not only organized terrorist groups, but individual weirdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses.”“

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  “[Labeling critics of Israel as anti-Semites] does work fairly well as a tactic.  Most people don’t want the grief that would inevitably come with even broaching such sensitive topics.  Second-and this is the really clever part of the intimidation-they have already been thoroughly convinced by previous ritual denunciations of other people as anti-Semites for their policy views that they begin to think that the people being so denounced really are anti-Semitic, which not only intimidates them from commenting but convinces them that the only people who would even be motivated to say anything critical or contrary must be people with bad motives.  They know that they don’t have any bad motives or prejudices like those people, and so go along with the intimidation.  After all, all those denunciations couldn’t all be politically motivated trash, could they?  Actually, they could.  We are watching it unfold before us yet again.”

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  That industrial processes dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is understood, but has anyone calculated what portion of the increase in CO2 levels is due to the *removal* of nitrogen from the atmosphere?

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  “The tree of life concept basically states that all living organisms are descended from previous living organisms, all the way to a unique common ancestor. However, this concept does not capture the possibility of lateral gene transfer, i.e., the fact that genes aren’t simply inherited from one’s ancestor(s) within the same species but can be transferred across species. The authors make the good point that algorithms designed to infer tree structures from genetic data, will -no surprise- infer such structures, and hence do not really “support” the idea that such structures really fit the evolutionary picture.”

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  “The American Jewish Committee, an ardent defender of Israel, is known for speaking out against anti-Semitism, but this conservative advocacy group has recently stirred up a bitter and emotional debate with a new target: liberal Jews.”

  “An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled ” `Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.”

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  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s open letter to George W. Bush.

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  “Lord Levy has been dramatically re-arrested in the ‘cash for honors’ row that is continuing to dominate the news in the UK. The story dominates today’s news and front-pages.”

It is similarly amusing when some fag rock star is knighted in Britain as “defender of the realm” or whatever.

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  “A former Border Patrol agent fired in 2001 for beating an undocumented immigrant on the head with a five-cell flashlight wants back wages and his old job now that a federal jury has found him not guilty of using excessive force.”

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  “Seven of the largest tunnels discovered under the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years have yet to be filled in, authorities said, raising concerns because smugglers have tried to reuse such passages before.”

  “Among the unfilled tunnels, created to ferry people and drugs, is the longest one yet found - extending nearly half a mile from San Diego to Tijuana. Nearby, another sophisticated passageway once known as the Taj Mahal of tunnels has been sitting unfilled for 13 years, authorities say.”

Landmines placed inside the tunnels would probably be an effective deterrent.

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  “The virtual collapse at Cantarell—the world’s second-biggest oilfield in terms of output at the start of last year—is unfolding much faster than projections from Mexico’s state-run oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Cantarell’s daily output fell to 1.5 million barrels in December compared to 1.99 million barrels in January, according to figures from the Mexican Energy Ministry.”

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  “Myths about the developing world”

Interesting work with the graphical representation of statistics.

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  ABCTech has an interesting article about an Emeryville-based tech startup, Amyris Biotechnologies, that is planning to use microbes to turn sugar into diesel. Ethanol is made by adding sugar to yeast, but Amyris believes that it can reprogram the microbes to make something closer to gasoline. The company was initially given a $43 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attempt to research the applications of Synthetic Biology for making a cost-effective malaria drug. Jack Newman, the Vice-President of Amyris said,

  “Why are we making ethanol if we’re trying to make a fuel? We should be making something that looks a lot more like gasoline. We should be making something that looks a lot more like diesel. And if you wanted to design, you name it, a jet fuel? We can make that too.”

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“Immigrants wishing to live in the small Canadian town of Herouxville, Quebec, must not stone women to death in public, burn them alive or throw acid on them, according to an extraordinary set of rules released by the local council.”

  “The declaration, published on the town’s Web site, has deepened tensions in the predominantly French-speaking province over how tolerant Quebecers should be toward the customs and traditions of immigrants.”

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  ” A group of scientists have created a portable refinery that efficiently converts food, paper and plastic trash into electricity. The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future.”

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  “Arizona State University placed a resident assistant on probation four days after he objected to a diversity training exercise that he said reinforced negative stereotypes and portrayed Christians as hateful and narrow-minded.”

  [...]

  “He said supervisors told him that part of the reason he was placed on probation was because he missed a different training exercise on homosexuality and gay marriage. He said he skipped the exercise because of his negative experience with the earlier activity.”

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  “In a recent IndustryWeek article, Mathew Hayward, assistant professor at the University of Colorado, does a Q&A on his new book, “Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris Is Wrecking Companies And Careers And How To Avoid The Trap”, which shows how executives’ inflated egos can impact what they choose to produce, the manufacturing decisions they make and how they market their products. What failures (colossal or otherwise) have you been involved in that could be attributed to Executive Hubris?”

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  See the daily front page from 561 newspapers in 56 countries.

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  “Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed an executive order that will require all schoolgirls to be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.”

  “Girls will have to get Merck’s new vaccine Gardasil, which protects against strains of human papillomavirus that are responsible for most cases of cervical cancer.”

  [...]

  “Merck worked hard to make the Texas mandate a reality, doubling its lobbying budget in the state and employing a former Perry chief of staff to make the company’s case to the governor and the Legislature.”

  “It also funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country. The mother-in-law of Perry’s current chief of staff is a state director for the organization.”

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