Month: March 2008

Obama’s Mom

A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path – New York Times
Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.

Phone That Reads Your Thoughts Out Loud

Nerve-tapping neckband used in ‘telepathic’ chat – tech – 12 March 2008 – New Scientist Tech
A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice. Thanks Chip Welfeld   The Audeo has previously been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts. Watch a video demonstrating thought control of wheelchairs

Why Europeans Refuse to Reproduce

The Corner on National Review Online
Because, replies the author of Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide, “children are expensive. They require you to sacrifice your time and your interests and your own comfort. If your highest good is pleasure, if your highest good is a sophisticated life, then children get in the way. Why would you spend so much money and so much energy on children if your highest good is simply material well-being? That’s sort of the spiritual dimension of the problem.”

The new geopolitics of crude oil

Khaleej Times Online – The new geopolitics of crude oil
View from a Dubai banker via Carlton Palmer – Last week was a defining moment in international relations. West Texas and North Sea Brent crude oil, the world’s light sweet crude benchmarks, soared to $105, above its inflation adjusted 1979 price of $92, when the Shah was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution and a buyer’s panic traumatised the Rotterdam market for spot tanker cargoes. While the immediate cause of the oil surge was an unexpected fall in US inventories and Opec’s failure to heed Bush’s call to boost production, black gold has become a hedge against the dollar, a new global currency of wealth and power, as the exponential increase in the numbers of Russians in the Forbes Global Billionaire list suggests.

Iraq has ‘more crude oil’ than Saudi Arabia

Iraq has ‘more crude oil’ than Saudi Arabia ->Emirates Business 24|7
This new 600 page book will feed all the “Iraq for Oil War” talk. With future religious unrest threatening established Oil Kingdoms, could the 2 ex-oilmen in the White House, have calculated that a friendly Iraq could help the world economy through the coming upheavals as modernization roils the Arab oil-producing regions? After all, Oil Men are gamblers at heart.  Chalabi, a former senior Iraqi oil ministry official, believes the country has huge undiscovered reserves on the grounds but no major development projects have been undertaken for more than two decades.

The proven reserves were officially put at 112 billion barrels in 2007 but Chalabi believes the final figure could exceed 300 billion barrels. “Iraq could have this figure, there is no exaggeration in this,” he said.

His view is supported by a Western oil analyst who goes even further by saying Iraq’s real oil potential could surpass that of Saudi Arabia, which controls nearly a quarter of the world’s proven oil deposits.

Colin Lothian, a senior analyst at United Kingdom-based energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, says Iraq has many giant oilfields that have remained undeveloped. Thanks to Carlton Palmer

Is Salvia the New Pot?

Is salvia the next marijuana?
Salvia is being targeted by lawmakers concerned that the inexpensive and easy-to-obtain plant could become the next marijuana. Eight states have already placed restrictions on salvia, and 16 others, including Florida, are considering a ban or have previously. Some say legislators are overreacting to a minor problem, but no one disputes that the plant impairs judgment and the ability to drive.

Native to Mexico and still grown there, salvia divinorum is generally smoked but can also be chewed or made into a tea and drunk.

Called nicknames like Sally-D, Magic Mint and Diviner’s Sage, salvia is a hallucinogen that gives users an out-of-body sense of traveling through time and space or merging with inanimate objects. Unlike hallucinogens like LSD or PCP, however, salvia’s effects last for a shorter time, generally up to an hour.

Solar Thermal Possiblities Abound

Solar Company Says Its Tech Can Power 90 Percent of Grid and Cars | Wired Science from Wired.com
Solar-thermal power is gaining adherents, including Google.org, which cut a deal with another player, eSolar, as a way to cleanly generate cost-competitive, city-scale amounts of power. Unlike traditional photovoltaics, which use panels to convert sunlight into electricity, solar-thermal plants focus the sun’s rays on liquids to make steam that powers turbines. Solar-thermal is flat-out more efficient — at 20 to 40 percent — than photovoltaics, which in the field convert sunlight to electricity at about 15 to 22 percent. And solar-thermal fits into the industrial model of power production, meaning that it works in big plants, not distributed across a bunch of houses and buildings.

new research (.pdf) was presented at the IEA SolarPACES conference in Las Vegas, and is described as peer-reviewed. The paper says Ausra expects to commercialize its energy-storage technology within two years. A prototype of the system will go into a model plant the company plans to finish this summer in Bakersfield, California, the company’s founder, David Mills, told Wired.com.

Companies have been piling into the solar-concentrating space. Stirling Energy Systems, SkyFuel, Solel, BrightSource, Rocketdyne, Abengoa and the aforementioned eSolar are all working on using mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy in one way or another.

Learn About SpyWare

Spyware Warrior: Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites

This is one of the best sources for protecting yourself on the Net. It’s not Viruses so much nowadays, but these more insidious forms of Malware. Some of it comes disguised as protection! Here is a list of bogus ones and further down the page a list of good ones. Many are free. There is also a list of removal tools, if it is already too late.

It is a good idea to run 2 of these catch the ones that get missed, as this is a constantly changing battlefield. Choose your weapons carefully. I use Spybot. The new version updates automatically and tries to defend you. But, I also run Super Anti Spyware. While you have to manually Update it, it finds more hidden bad guys and does a better job of removing them.