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• A federal judge has refused to require the Justice Department to disclose a memorandum providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a US citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. This is highly troubling; the entire drone strike programme has been conducted in the utmost secrecy, which in turn means that there has been very little citizen oversight.  We’re told that al-Aulaqi was a bad person.  A monster.  A terrorist.  Or at any rate, that he was an enemy combatant who had taken up arms against the US.  And yet all we really know is that he was a US citizen, who was given little (or no) opportunity to present his side.  Legally, his killing may have been permissible.  Perhaps even morally — and yet how can we know?  And the death two weeks later of al-Aulaqi’s 16-year-old son merely heightens these concerns.  Under Obama, the US appears to claim the power to target US citizens anywhere on the globe, merely on the assertion that they have taken part in hostilities against the US.  Now, it seems Americans aren’t even allowed to know the legal reasoning behind the claim.  With such little transparency, how can anyone support these actions?  With so little oversight, how could any US president resist the temptation to stretch the rules or shade the truth?  For a discussion of the legal justification for the killing, see here.  For a discussion of the moral issues and the intense lack of transparency, see here.

Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs offered a sad justification for the drone killing of al-Aulaqi’s innocent 16-year-old American citizen son — “he should have had a more responsible father.”  [Seriously?  American songwriter Conor Oberst wrote a song more than a decade ago with these appropriate lyrics: “Now men with purple hearts carry silver guns / And they’ll kill a man for what his father’s done / But what my father did, you know it don’t mean shit / I’m not him.”

• Is the need for Middle Eastern oil more important to Americans’ future than their conduct as a moral and ethical people?  American journalist Robert Kaplan wrote a book, The Revenge of Geography, which its reviewer sums up in a single phrase from Ambrose Bierce: War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.   Kaplan insists that the Iraq war was a way of teaching neoconservatives to pay attention to terrain.  That war, of which he was an enthusiast, was a catastrophe, he now admits (a mistake he expresses deep remorse for supporting); he failed to pay attention to the lay of the land.  The view, prevalent among “humanitarian interventionists,” was that you could build liberal institutions more-or-less wherever you wanted: on the tiny island of Trinidad or in cold, vast, latitudinal Canada, rainy Scotland, sunny northern Italy, the tropics of Taiwan, the deserts of Israel.  Let smart people make money with new ideas in a society where cops can’t easily be bribed and the judges aren’t entirely bought — then liberal democracy would prosper.  [The Iraq war was because the US wanted to be helpful,  See?]  The mention of humanitarian interventionists makes it sound like the Iraq war was intended as a kindness to people of Iraq, but does Kaplan really mean that?  In 1994 he published an article called “The Coming Anarchy” wherein he argues that population increase, urbanisation, and resource depletion undermine fragile governments across the developing world, threatening the developed world.  In 2000 he wrote another controversial essay entitled, “The Dangers of Peace,” in which he described America falling under peacetime’s “numbing and corrosive illusion.”  He sees large parts of the world where the US military is operating as “injun country”, which must be civilised by the same methods used to subdue the American Frontier in the 1800s.  [Slaughter?]  For the US to maintain power, he says it must link its goals with the goals of people in the developing world.  Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, declares in his recently-released memoirs that ‘...the Iraq war is largely about oil’.  “People say we’re not fighting for oil.  Of course we are,” says the Republican Senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel [the US president’s current nominee for Secretary of Defense] to Catholic University law students about 5 years ago.  “They talk about America’s national interest.  What the hell do you think they’re talking about?  We’re not there for figs.”  Yet no honest conversations have occurred in public to involve Americans in an open discussion about this topic.  US actions in Iraq have led to as many as a million Iraqi deaths, many more wounded, and 4.4 million displaced.  Americans have come to accept that US policy will include the moral and ethical disruptions of war, even though the people invaded had not attacked them.  But note: by the year 2020, energy will be 50% more expensive, in real terms, than today.  This will carry through into the cost of almost everything – including food.  Was Kaplan’s vision of anarchy not that far-fetched?
• ‘Sooner or later — by intent or by accident — we’ll face a catastrophic breakdown of the Internet.  Yet we have no Plan B in place to reboot a rudimentary, low-bandwidth emergency communication network if the high-bandwidth system on which we’ve come to depend were to fail.  In the event of a major network disruption, most of us will have no idea what to do except to try checking the Internet for advice.  As the system begins to recover, the resulting overload may bring 'recovery’ to a halt.  The ancestor of the Internet was the store-and-forward punched-paper-tape telegraph network.  This low-bandwidth, high-latency system was sufficient to convey important messages, like 'Send ammunition’ or 'Arriving New York 12 Dec.  Much love.  Stop.’  We need a low-bandwidth, high-latency store-and-forward message system that can run in emergency mode on an ad-hoc network assembled from mobile phones and laptop computers even if the main networks fail.  We should keep this system on standby, and periodically exercise it, along with a network of volunteers trained in network first aid the way we train lifeguards and babysitters in CPR.  These first responders, like the amateur radio operators who restore communications after natural disasters, would prioritise essential communications, begin the process of recovery, and relay instructions as to what to do next.  Most computers — from your car’s engine controller to your desktop — can be rebooted into safe mode to get you home.  But no safe mode for the Internet?  We should be worried about that.’  (Written by George Dyson, science historian and author.)

• Tug boat worker Brett Martin said he and his colleagues were west of False Island when the thunderstorm, which quickly strengthened and gathered dust, passed over Onslow and headed to the Indian Ocean.  “We were steaming along in the boat just before sunset and the storm was casually building in the distance, then it got faster and faster and went from glass to about 40 knots in 2 minutes.”  Jonathan Erdman, meteorologist for The Weather Channel, was amazed by the photos Martin took.  “In 18 years of meteorology, I’ve never seen a white shelf cloud capping the brownish dirt from a haboob like that.”
• When Australia’s weather bureau model started churning out predictions of more than 50°C (122°F), chart producers quietly extended the scale beyond the level they had previously used.  It now shows 50-52°C as deep purple.  As yet, the new maximum scale of 52-54°C (126-129°F), to be coloured hot pink, hasn’t been used, though each of first 8 days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record.
• The Holmes family takes refuge under a jetty as a wildfire rages nearby in the Tasmanian town of Dunalley, Australia.  The fire destroyed around 90 homes in Dunalley, east of the state capital. Hobart.  For 2½ hours, the family huddled beneath the jetty, up to their necks in water, gulping mouthfuls of increasingly toxic air.  “There were times when we had to move deeper because it was too hot, and there were times when the jetty itself caught fire,” said grandfather Tim Holmes.  Eventually Mr Holmes found a dinghy and dragged everyone about 300 yards out to sea, where air was breathable.

• A fire burns in Ku-Ring-Gai National Park, north of Sydney.  Meanwhile, other fires were burning in New South Wales, and also in Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory.
• While parts of Australia burned, the after-effects of an ex-tropical cyclone Oswald pounded northern and central Queensland, bringing heavy rains and damaging winds.  There’s no letup of the extreme weather for the Australian state.  A massive monsoon trough spanned as far south as Gladstone and some areas had a metre of rainfall in the 4 days . A severe storm hit Hay Point lashing the area with 139 kilometre-per-hour winds.  “There is every possibility there was a tornado or waterspout associated with that,” Bureau of Meteorology forecaster David Grant said.  A severe weather warning for damaging winds and heavy rain was issued for east coast Queensland and adjacent areas down to Bundaberg.  Towns around the southeast Queensland city of Bundaberg are without power after 5 mini-tornadoes wreaked havoc in the area.
• Weather-related comments wrapup: People who accidentally start fires while mowing their lawns could find themselves in jail.  About 60 fire fighters were needed to fight a fire at Kalimna West on Friday that was started by a ride-on mower cutting long grass.  In other news, Gippsland’s electricity provider, SP Ausnet, says people should expect more power outages on days of extreme heat.  About 20,000 Gippsland homes and businesses lost power on Friday when temperatures soared above 40°C.  Future warming of the climate due to greenhouse gas emissions will very likely result in weather events which are increasingly beyond our prior experiences.  And it’s not just temperature extremes.  Climate model projections indicate that the frequency of many different types of extreme weather will change as the planet warms.  The heatwave stranded thousands of commuters, with dozens of trains delayed as steel wires buckled and a hose used to run a key signalling system melted.  On the central coast, the heat caused an overhead wire to buckle onto a train at about 1:30pm, trapping about 250 passengers for ½ an hour.  As temperatures cooled and the southerly approached, lightning strikes sparked multiple small fires across the state.  The monorail ground to a halt, spitting sparks that started a soon-extinguished grass fire next to Darling Harbour.

• What is normal to most people in winter has so far been impossible in physics: a minus temperature.  On the Celsius scale, minus temperatures are only surprising in summer.  On the absolute temperature scale, used by physicists (called the Kelvin scale), it’s not possible to go below zero – at least not in the sense of getting colder than zero Kelvin.  According to the physical meaning of temperature, the temperature of a gas is determined by the chaotic movement of its particles – the colder the gas, the slower the particles.  At zero Kelvin (-273°C) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears.  Thus, nothing can be colder than absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.  But physicists have now created an atomic gas in the laboratory that nonetheless has negative Kelvin values.  These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behaviour that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology.  At a negative absolute temperature the energy distribution of particles inverts in comparison to a positive temperature.  The gas is not colder than zero Kelvin, but hotter — it’s even hotter than at any positive temperature.  Supposedly impossible heat engines such as a combustion engine with a thermodynamic efficiency of over 100% could be realised with the help of negative absolute temperatures.  At first sight it may sound strange that a negative absolute temperature is hotter than a positive one.  This is simply a consequence of the historic definition of absolute temperature, however; if it were defined differently, this apparent contradiction would not exist.
• Methane clathrate, also called methane hydrate or fire ice, is a solid compound in which a large amount of methane is trapped within a crystal structure of water, forming a solid similar to ice.  Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the solar system where temperatures are low and water ice is common, large deposits have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth.  The worldwide amount of carbon bound in hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth.  They’re believed to form by migration of gas from depth along geological faults followed by crystallization on contact with cold sea water.  They’re also present in deep Antarctic ice cores and possibly in deep freshwater lakes like Lake Baikal, Siberia.  Continental deposits have been located in Siberia and Alaska in sandstone and siltstone at less than 800 metres depth.  The sedimentary hydrate reservoir probably contains 2–10 times the currently known reserves of conventional natural gas.  This represents a potentially important future source of hydrocarbon fuel.  However, deposits are usually too dispersed for economic extraction.  Methane, a greenhouse gas, is 10 times more effective than carbon dioxide in causing climate warming.  One litre of methane clathrate solid contains on average 168 litres of methane gas.  Methane bound in hydrates amounts to approximately 3,000 times the volume of methane in the atmosphere.  There’s insufficient information to judge what geological processes might affect hydrate stability in sediments and possibly cause the release of methane into the atmosphere.  Released as a result of landslides caused by a sea-level fall, they would warm the earth, as would methane released in Arctic sediments if they warm during a sea-level rise.  This might stabilise climatic fluctuation or it could exacerbate climatic warming and destabilise the climate more.  And faster.
• By 1995, a billion cubic meters of helium gas had been collected in the official US reserve, and it was US$1.4 billion in debt.  This prompted Congress in 1996 to phase out the reserve.  This led to a glut of cheap helium on the world market and a plummet in the price.  The entire US strategic reserve is expected to be sold off by 2015.  Scientists believe this explains why oil companies have not bothered to collect much of the helium released to the air during the mining of natural gas.  The supply of helium, an inert element with the lowest boiling point of any known substance, has now become so erratic that scientists are calling for a ban on all but the most essential uses – which could mean no more helium-filled party balloons (consumes 8% of the world’s supply).  Of the 2008 world helium total production of about 32 million kilograms (193 million standard cubic metres) helium, the largest use (about 22% of the total in 2008) is in cryogenic applications, most of which involves cooling the superconducting magnets in medical MRI scanners.  Other major uses (totalling to about 78% of use in 1996) were pressurizing and purging systems, maintenance of controlled atmospheres, and welding.  Other uses by category were relatively minor fractions.  It cools the magnets used to make semiconductors for mobile phones.  Fibre optic cables are made in a helium atmosphere to stop bubbles getting trapped.  Divers and others working under pressure use mixtures of helium, oxygen and nitrogen to breathe under water.  Even though helium is the second most common element on Earth, only a finite amount is available for use and this store is non-renewable.  Some experts suggest supplies could be depleted by the middle of the century.  Helium is also critical for the massive magnets used by the Large Hadron Collider.

• The most common lie on a résumé has to do with education.  The discovery that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson didn’t have a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science (he had a bachelor of science degree in business administration, with a major in accounting) cost him his job.  Was this that a serious gaffe?  Before joining Yahoo, he was the CEO of PayPal and president of eBay, so he presumably could perform the job.  Then why did he lie?  (In NZ, it’s considered fraud and people have been imprisoned for lying about their qualifications.)  ADP Screening and Selection Services says that they found more than 50% of job applicants submitted false information on their résumés and employment applications, all uncovered during employment and education checks in 2003.  That compares with about 40% in 2002.  From Overheard: Morgansher: “I’m bitter about having lost out twice to people who lie on their resumes and get jobs I applied for.”  Denman838: “Get caught lying on a resume, even years later, and you’re out the door.  AND the company ought to be able to sue you for fraud.  This is really simple: If you cheat and lie to get something, everything that comes afterward is founded on that lie.”  Justin Hamaker: “People pad their education because companies put a priority on a degree without regard to experience.  I’m amazed that for many positions someone with a bachelor’s degree in an unrelated field is considered, but not an otherwise qualified candidate without a degree.”
• Little Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a marabou feather.  Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble.  We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2½, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut.  Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.  For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6 or so.  It was a matter of practicality — the baby was dressed in white frocks and diapers because white cotton could be bleached.
• North Korea can be looked at as the most successful cult in the world, and after bribing the military and other key allies, the vast majority of the state’s resources were dedicated to (1) raising the Kims to divinity and (2) hermetically sealing the state to outside discourse.  After nearly ¾ of a century of wholesale brainwashing, it’s highly likely that a huge swath of the population of North Korea is in the grips of a kind of mass psychosis.  Real tears when Kim Yong-il died?  For many.  But would these people have cried if they knew the REAL man?

Evidence shows that what you choose to do now may affect your future children.  For example, boys who smoke before the age of 11 (before they first begin producing sperm) have sons with significantly higher body mass indices (BMI) than expected.  How is that possible?  The answer lies in epigenetics.  “Epi” is Greek for “above” or “on top”.  Epigenetics helps explain why each cell-type in the human body has exactly the same DNA sequence but looks and functions very differently — think sperm and brain cells.  Chemical tags known as epigenetic marks (epi-marks) are grafted onto DNA or the histone structures supporting it and act as signposts telling a cell to either use or ignore this particular gene.  In this way the approximately 25,000 genes in DNA can be divided into many combinations, producing all possible cell-types.  One key epi-mark is DNA methylation.  Once deposited, it tends to stay put.  It signifies that nearby genes should be ignored.  If methylation occurs in sperm or egg DNA, it can be transmitted to the next generation and influence how genes are used across the entire body — a process known as epigenetic inheritance.  [Is this a way to pass information gained from the environment from one generation to the next?]

• Early maternal care affects offspring’s reactivity to stress.  High care results in a positive long-term effect by decreasing adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone in response to stress in offspring.  The effects of parental care result from epi-marks (high care leads to decreased DNA methylation).  Decreased methylation allows increased access to hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor genes in offspring, which causes the hippocampus to release less ACTH-releasing hormone, so…less ACTH.  This means the adrenal glands release less cortisol.  In contrast, less parental care results in increased cortisol, a reaction to psychological stress.  Offspring that receive less care are more prone to react to stress.  The maternal genotype doesn’t determine stress reactions in offspring, but the early parental care environment does.  When offspring are removed from low-care mothers and placed with high-care mothers, the epi-marks related to increased stress response are reversed.  When offspring are removed from high-care parents and placed with low-care mothers, epi-marks appear.  The stress response in offspring is determined by the foster mother, not the genetic mother.  Stable epi-marks for parental care can be passed down from one generation to the next from mother to female offspring.  Female offspring who received increased parental care become mothers who engage in high-care (and vice-versa).  Daughters of mothers with high-care behaviour evidence increased expression of an estrogen receptor gene in the hypothalamus – an area of the brain linked to maternal nurturing.  This is methylated (to be “off”) in low-care offspring.
• From The Quarterly Review of Biology: Sex-specific epi-marks can contribute to homosexuality.  Normally, these epi-marks are not inherited and are thus lost.  However when they aren’t lost (and the rules for retention are, as yet, unknown), they’re able to transfer from father to daughter or mother to son.  Essentially, genes hold directions, while epi-marks instruct how (if) directions are put into motion and completed.  Historically, epi-marks are eliminated and created anew with each generation, but they occasionally pass over between generations, causing similarities within families that appear as shared genes.  Sex-specific epi-marks are made during early fœtal development and serve as security against the considerable natural variation in testosterone that happens in late fœtal development.  For example, sex-specific epi-marks prevent female fœtuses from becoming masculine when unusually high levels of testosterone are present (vice versa for male fœtuses).  Different kinds of epi-marks safeguard different sex-specific characteristics; some protect the genitals, others protect sexual identity, still others keep safe sexual partner preference.  When epi-marks pass between generations from fathers to daughters or mothers to sons, they can result in reverse effects — feminization of characteristics in sons or masculinization of some characteristics in daughters; occasionally, it affects sexual preference.
• In an attempt to cope with environmental stress, alcohol and drugs are used as escape.  Once substance use starts, however, epi-marks further exacerbate the biological and behavioural changes associated with addiction.  Even short-term use can produce long-lasting epi-marks via DNA methylation and histone modification.  This has been observed for alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamines, and opiate use.  Specifically, these epi-marks modify gene expression, increasing the vulnerability of an individual to repeat substance use in the future.  Increased use results in even more epi-marks in the brain’s pleasure-reward areas.  A cycle emerges.  In humans, alcohol consumption produces epi-marks that increase alcohol craving, playing a part in the progression from controlled intake to loss of control.  Nicotine-related epi-marks have been found in smokers 10 years after they stopped smoking.

• Sometimes it seems like all indulgences in life are bad for us.  We desire things that provide short-term satisfaction, yet harbour long-term negative consequences.  In order to enjoy guilty pleasures, we find ways to justify their consumption.  Adverse experiences serve the purpose, providing a convenient rationale for self indulgence and making us feel entitled to a little pleasure.
• A series of studies by an Australian research team conclude that because humans consider pain as punishment, therefore, they feel entitled to a reward.  [This is a biased phrasing.  Why not say “feel they need of that salve provided by a little pleasure”?]  People who feel unjustly subject to pain feel more entitled to “guilty” pleasures rather than more practical ones.  Researchers conclude that people have different ideas of justice and different sensitivities to injustice that they consider to be personal.  These feelings of injustice combine with pain to create a greater feeling of entitlement with less guilt and therefore the ability to take much greater liberties with pleasures or rewards.  This has implications for thefts of all kinds, smoking, drinking, overeating, cheating.  People feel justified in rewarding themselves when they’re victims of unfair treatment.  Their pain leads to self-reward but only in contexts that frame the experience of their pain as “unjust.”
• New gym members sometimes use their gym time to justify an increase in unhealthy behaviours.  There may be a direct causal link between the physical pain inflicted at the gym and the guilty pleasure of unhealthy eating.  The person would first have to believe the pain was unjust, and so this may be more likely to occur when pressure to go to the gym comes from somebody else.

• Dan Dennett repeats this quote from Lee Siegel, author of a book on Indian street magic.  “'I’m writing a book on magic,’ I explain, and I’m asked, 'Real magic?’  By 'real magic’ people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers.  'No,’ I answer: 'Conjuring tricks, not real magic.’  Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.”  Now consider this passage from Jerry Coyne’s USA Today article: “The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.  Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our illusion that we really do make choices.
• In the early 1980s I worried that the computer revolution would reinforce and amplify the divide between the (well-to-do, Western) technocrats and those around the world who couldn’t afford computers and similar high-tech gadgetry.  I dreaded a particularly malignant sorting of the haves and havenots, with the rich getting ever richer and the poor being ever more robbed of political and economic power by their lack of access to the new information technology.  I devoted serious time and effort to raising the alarm about this, and trying to think of programmes to forestall or alleviate it, but before I’d managed to make any significant progress, the issue was happily swept out of my hands by the creation of the Internet.  I was an Arpanet user, but that didn’t help me anticipate what was coming.  We’ve seen a lot of rich technocrats getting richer, but also seen the most profoundly democratising spread of technology in history.  Cellphones and laptops, and now smart phones and tablets, put worldwide connectivity in the hands of billions, adding to the inexpensive transistor radios and tv sets that led the way.  The planet has become informationally transparent in a way nobody imagined only 40 years ago.  This is wonderful, mostly.  Religious institutions that could always rely in the past on the relative ignorance of their flock must now revise their proselytizing and indoctrinating policies or risk extinction.  Dictators face the dire choice between maximal suppression — turning their nations into prisons — or tolerating an informed, well-connected opposition.  Knowledge really is power as people are coming to realise all over the world.  This levelling gives us something new to worry about, however.  We’ve become so dependent on this technology that we’ve created a shocking new vulnerability.  We don’t have to worry much about an impoverished teenager making a nuclear weapon in his basement room; it would cost millions and be hard to do inconspicuously given the exotic materials required.  But such a teenager with a laptop and an Internet connection can explore the world’s electronic weak spots for hours every day, almost undetectably and at almost no cost, with very slight risk of being caught and punished.  Yes, the Internet is brilliantly designed to be so decentralised and redundant that it’s almost invulnerable, but robust as it is, it isn’t perfect.  The saboteurs may not have much money, but we won’t have any either, if the Internet goes down.  Our choice is simple: we can wait for them to annihilate what we have (more likely every day), or we can begin to share what we have with them.  It would be prudent to start brainstorming about how to keep panic at bay if a long-term disruption of large parts of the Internet were to occur.  Will hospitals, fire stations, supermarkets, gas stations, and pharmacies keep functioning?  How will people be able to get information they trust?  Panic can be contagious and when it happens people make crazy and regrettable decisions.  As long as we insist on living in the fast lane, we should learn how to get on and off without creating mayhem.  (Written by Daniel C Dennett, professor at Tufts University.)
• Each neuron, far from being a simple logical switch, is a little agent with an agenda, and they are much more autonomous and much more interesting than any switch.  They aren’t dutiful slaves or simple machines but agents that have to be kept in line and properly rewarded, and they can form coalitions and cabals and organisations and alliances.  This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like an amusing fantasy at first, but is now something I take more and more seriously.  Evolutionary biologist see that, at the genetic level, there’s a conflict between the genes you get from your mother and the genes you get from your father; they’re in an opponent relationship and if they get out of whack, serious imbalances can happen that show up as particular psychological anomalies.  Your brain isn’t a well-organised hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy.  In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy.  Sometimes you achieve stability and mutual aid and a calm united front, but it’s always possible for things to get out of whack, for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions.  Control is the real key, but control in brains is different from control in computers.  Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.  You really don’t have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn’t want to do.  No, they’re all slaves.  If they’re agents, they’re slaves — prisoners.  They get fed every day (they don’t have to worry about where the energy’s coming from); they’re not ambitious.  They just do what they’re asked to do and do it brilliantly with only the slightest tint of comprehension.  You get all the power of computers out of these mindless little robotic slave prisoners, but that’s not the way your brain is organised.  Each neuron is imprisoned in your brain, cells within prison cells.  Every neuron in your brain, indeed, every human cell in your body (leaving aside all the symbionts), is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves for about a billion years as free-swimming, free-living agents.  They fended for themselves and survived.  They developed know-how and a lot of self-protective talent to do that.  When they joined forces into multi-cellular creatures, they mostly gave that up and became domesticated, part of larger whole.  My hunch is that in our cortical areas, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral, a little bit like what happens when you let sheep or pigs go feral: they recover their wild talents very fast.  Maybe some neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives.  They’re struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons.  As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organisation is the secret of our greater capacity for creativity and imagination.  The price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and other problems.  This idea that a person is made of lots of little people is comically simpleminded in some ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

• What underlies the character trait of messiness?  (Character trait as used here would be defined as “a distinctive but not necessarily invariable feature exhibited by all individuals of a group and capable of being described or measured.”  Messy has a verb form can mean “characterised by moral or psychological confusion,” though that definition may not apply to the noun messiness.  The definition of messy that I’m discussing here is to be “dirty, untidy, or disordered.”  Synonyms are grungy, sloppy, slovenly, or untidy.  Associated personality traits are being easygoing, relaxed (or just plain lax), and even careless.  A procrastinator?  Likely.  Perennially running late?  (I’d guess.)  He is untidy, his house / room / office a disaster.  [What if it’s just a closet or a drawer?]  Why doesn’t he put anything away?  Because there’s no designated place: he doesn’t know where to put it.  All his storage spaces are full with stuff he never uses.  All the stuff he uses is out where he can see it.  So he changes his clothes, tossing the used ones in a pile.  When the pile gets big enough, he’ll know he needs to launder.  Disarray doesn’t bother him — he lives with it.
• Are you a slob?  Do you pile papers on top of folders on top of game boxes?  Here’s the thing that neat people can’t believe: you’re more productive than they are.  That’s the conclusion of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, a book that argues that neatness is overrated, costs money, wastes time, and quashes creativity.  From the Comments: “In other news: People with anorexia found to be more productive than normal eaters.  'It’s quite ingenious!’ exclaimed one researcher, 'It seems that because anorexics don’t need to take time to eat, they’re far more productive!’  When asked whether health implications or possible mortality ensuing from anorexia could negatively affect productivity, the researcher became angry and left the interview.  On a serious note: One can get a lot done when he doesn’t have to deal with cleaning up.  But there’s a certain point at which stench, the impossibility of finding important items, and spousal/partner/co-worker nagging wipe out any increased productivity.”
• A comment by Kevbo: “Take a kid 4 or 5 years old.  Tell him to clean his room.  Don’t show him how, don’t help, don’t make any suggestions.  Then when he fails, yell at him until he cries.  Tell him how worthless he is.  An hour later, when he’s stopped crying but the room still isn’t clean, spank him.  Then clean the room when he’s at school (don’t show him how), and yell at him when he gets home for not doing it himself.  Then yell at him some more as soon as he leaves anything out of place — which he will, because he doesn’t know where you’ve designated for him to put them.  Be sure to keep mentioning how worthless he is.  This is how you end up with an adult that has full blown panic attacks when faced with cleaning.”

• Factors contributing to messy rooms:    /    Oblivion — being unaware of surroundings or tuning out the environment.    /    Busy-ness — rushing off in the middle of things and no time to clean up later.    /    Distraction — drawn away from the task, starting to clean, distracted again.    /    Convenience — liking to have everything close at hand.    /    Multi-tasking — starting many projects at once, working on them simultaneously.    /    Stickynotes — leaving things out to remind you to finish them.

Some people accumulate useless sentimental items, things they simply like but don’t know what to do with.  They value the presence of these items and the resulting overall feel of the room — not based on what’s functional and efficient, but on what conjurs up good feelings.  This allows things which may seem to be merely adding clutter to not be considered “in the way” to them — because its mere presence IS its purpose.

• There are about 75 Colorado members of the National Association of Professional Organizers.  These people specialise in corporate, residential and time management organisation, and charge $50-$200 per hour.  Teri Lynn Mabbitt, president of the state chapter, says disorganisation is a symptom of something else.  “The art is in digging deep to understand the cause.”  To help clients process ties to clutter, one organiser asks people how each item in the room enhances their lives: “Do you like this item?  Does it weigh you down?  Do you feel stuck to it?”  Things that clients don’t want to part with are put into a bin for a week.  “At the end of the week if they remember what’s in the bin,” she says, “they can keep it.”
• ‘Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been a really messy person.  I’m pretty good about common spaces (I’m not a monster) but when it comes to my own personal living space, there are clothes, books, and various other items covering at least half the floor at any given time.  I’m not living in squalor, mind you; there are no dirty dishes or science experiments lying around.  But my messiness does make it tougher to sweep, so my room has a higher population of dust bunnies than it probably should.  I tend to use the side of the bed I don’t sleep on as a place to store clothes, which then get pushed onto the floor when my boyfriend comes over.  Then back to the bed, then back to the floor, et cetera.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt really bad for being this way — like I’m either mentally deficient in some very specific way, or just really lazy.  I’m pretty sure there’s an area of the human brain dedicated to wanting things orderly, and mine is simply defective or missing.  It’s not the mess that bothers me (if it bothered me, it wouldn’t be there), but the judgements it causes people to make about me.  Are they right to judge me?  Maybe I am a shitty, incompetent person because of the way my room looks.  I mean, I hold a steady job, give money to charity, and carry on meaningful relationships with people, but there are undies on the floor and none of my socks match.’

• The tee-shirt reads: “Half the people you know are below average.”  But is this even true?  Consider: Half of all people are (by definition) below the median (average), if you know a statistically neutral sampling of people.  But some attributes have assymetrical distributions about the mean — intelligence is usally cited as an example.  Why?  Because there’s a lower bound on how stupid you can be and still survive, but it isn’t known just how smart you can be and survive.  That makes more than 50% of the population stupider than the average.  In a similar fashion, almost everyone (somewhat famously) has more than the average number of legs.  There is an upper bound on the number of legs humans have that’s equal to the median (the average), but the lower bound is below the median, thus the mean is less than the median — or to put it another way, the median person has an above-average number of legs.)  George Carlin had a line in one of his routines that went something like: “Think about the average person.  Think about how DUMB they are.  Now think: ½ the people out there….are even dumber than that!”
• The average person tells 4 lies a day or 1,460 a year, a total of 87,600 by the age of 60.  And the most common lie is: “I’m fine.”
• You’re smarter than the average person.  Unfortunately, the average person is really stupid.

• In March 2011, an earthquake struck the oceans near Tohoku, a region on Japan’s east coast.  With a magnitude of 9.0, it was among the 5 most powerful earthquakes ever recorded.  A quake that large shouldn’t have happened at Tohoku, at least not to the best of Japanese scientists’ knowledge.  The hazard maps they had drawn up predicted that big earthquakes would strike in one of 3 zones to the south of the country — Tokai, Tonankai, or Nankai.  No earthquake has hit these regions since 1975, while several occurred in “low-probability” zones, such as Tohoku.  Japan isn’t alone.  The incredibly destructive earthquakes that hit Wenchuan, China in 2008 and Christchurch, NZ in 2010 and 2011 all happened in areas deemed to be “relatively safe”.  These events remind us that earthquake prediction teeters precariously between the overly vague and overly precise.  Indeed, some scientists, such as Robert Geller from the University of Tokyo, think that prediction is outright impossible.  In a 1997 paper, starkly titled, “Earthquakes Cannot Be Predicted”, he argues that the factors that influence the birth and growth of earthquakes are so numerous and complex that measuring and analysing them is a fool’s errand.
• The Zagros Mountains are the largest mountain range in Iran and Iraq, extending northwest-southeast from the Sirvan (Diyala) River to Shiraz.  The Zagros range is about 550 miles (900 kilometres) long and more than 150 miles (240 kilometres) wide.  Composed primarily of limestone and shale, the thrust belt was formed by collision of two tectonic plates — the Eurasian and Arabian Plates.  Signs of early agriculture date back as far as 9000 BC to the Zagros foothills.  The Iranian part of the Zagros Basin has more than 300 anticlines with north-west to south-east dominant trends; roughly 1/3 of these contain petroleum resources.
• In structural geology, an anticline is a fold that is convex up and has its oldest beds at its core.  On a geologic map, anticlines are usually recognised by a sequence of rock layers that are progressively older toward the centre of the fold because the uplifted core of the fold is preferentially eroded to a deeper stratigraphic level relative to the topographically lower flanks.  The strata dip away from the centre, or crest, of the fold.  If an anticline plunges (that is, is inclined to the earth’s surface), the surface strata will form V shapes that point in the direction of plunge.  This one is located near Mexican Hat, Utah, USA.

• Lord Howe Island is pristine in every sense of the word.  The grass around the island is like golf course grass, well manicured and immaculately kept.  The trees (palms, evergreens and others) are impeccably kept and trimmed.  There are 240 types of birds.  There is no trash.  Mobile phones don’t work and Internet is not readily available.  People are as nice as humanly possible and everyone waves to one another — it’s a rule. Everything is walking or biking distance from where you would stay and the beaches are tremendous.  Additionally, there are plenty of hikes to give unreal views of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Island group (one of only 4 in the world with that distinction).  The crystal lagoon is bordered by the world’s most southerly coral reef.  Just wander in off the beach to snorkel among colourful tropical and sub-tropical fish, turtles and other marine life.  The water is so clean and clear, it’s like swimming in an aquarium.  (The island, about 10 kilometres long, is located in the South Pacific, 700 kilometres northeast of Sydney.)
• Aerial view of the Agatti Aerodrome is located on the southern end of Agatti Island, in the union territory of Lakshadweep in India.  It’s operated by the Airports Authority of India, the only airstrip in the Lakshadweep Islands (Lakshadweep means “one hundred thousand islands”), which is off the west coast of India.  Only 3 Lakshadweep islands — Agatti, Kadmat, and Bangaram — are open to foreign tourists, and the Indian government employs a strictly enforced entry-permit system.  All the islands are owned by indigenous people and land is unavailable for purchase by non-natives; even a man marrying a local woman may not buy land there.  Ten islands in the archipelago are populated, almost exclusively by Malayalam- speaking Sunni Muslims who make their living from fishing and harvesting coconuts.  The islands form the smallest Union Territory of India: their total surface area is just 32 square kilometres (12 square miles).  The lagoon area covers about 4,200 square kilometres (1,600 square miles).
• Chile’s Marble Cathedral is located on the second-largest freshwater lake in South America, in Patagonia, Chile.  The unique blue light in the cave is caused by the reflection of the water on the marble walls.  Due to the lake being fed by glacial run off, the height of the water is always fluctuating, creating an environment that changes depending on time of year.

Two of them are CG and one is hand-drawn — and all are incredibly well done.  Click on each photo for artist details.

• Modelled in Maya, sculpted and painted in Mudbox, rendered in Vray with a dome light.  Hair and face fuzz was done in Shave and rendered separately with Mental Ray.  Adjustments by Photoshop.
• This is a portrait drawn by hand.  In 2004, an unconscious man was discovered behind a fast food restaurant in Richmond Hill, Georgia.  He had no belongings, severe sunburn, and was nearly blind from cataracts.  The man also had absolutely no idea who he was.  After months of ongoing evaluation from doctors and psychologists it was determined he was suffering from dissociative amnesia.  He adopted the pseudonym Benjaman Kyle and embarked on a search for his true identity, sparking massive amounts of media coverage and even a short film, Finding Benjaman, by John Wikstrom.  He’s the only citizen in the US officially listed as missing despite his whereabouts being known.  For why it’s felt he’s a citizen, see the remarkable amount of information that’s been determined about him just from his spotty memories and his DNA.  They’ve even found a set of second cousins — yet Benjaman’s true identity stubbornly remains unknown.  He can’t obtain a social security number, which prevents him from opening a bank account or having a credit card.  (The government argues that he must already have one.)  A local business owner offered him a job washing dishes, a job which he still has, so he no longer sleeps in the woods.  He now lives in an air-conditioned shed through another donor’s generosity.  He is 64.
• Modelled in 3dsmax, rendered with Vray 1.5 sp4 and Hairfarm for the hair.  ZBrush was used for something unspecified.

• The fantastic beech forest of France’s Ayguebonne forest with late spring vibrant colours, shot after rain, dark and foggy.
• Edison and Ford Winter Estates are two homes with gardens on the Caloosahatchee River in Ft Meyers, Florida.  Thomas Edison first bought a home there in 1885 because he loved the bamboo grove and wanted the fibres to test as filaments for the light bulb.  Rail travel to Fort Myers was not available as yet (it began in 1904) so he had to come down by boat from St Augustine.  In 1916, his friend Henry Ford bought a home next door.  The two came down for winters with their families.  Near the caretaker’s cottage is a moonlight garden created by Edison’s wife, where a pool surrounded by flower pots reflects the full moon.  Edison was busy filing new patents (1,093 in total) and creating a diverse range of inventions.  Because he and Ford needed to find a domestic source of rubber and other materials for their inventions, he planted a number of trees on the property, including this banyan tree.  It was given to Edison by Harvey Firestone in 1925, so he could try out the sap as a source of rubber (not a viable option in the end).  The tree’s canopy covers one acre of land.  Edison also had hundreds of royal palms brought from Cuba and planted for 1.5 miles along McGregor Boulevard.  He also had a double row of mango trees decked out with orchids from all over the world.
• A short tunnel in Parc Montsouris, 14éme, along the Petite Ceinture, an old abandoned railway line that circles Paris.  A lack of protection around France’s principal cities was largely blamed for France’s defeat by the Prussian armies in the 1814-1815 wars, and rail transport (a recent invention) was held in high esteem by France’s military for its ability to quickly transport troops and material throughout the country.  Paris’ future circular railway was a meeting of these ideas.  It served urban travellers from 1862 to 1934 before being abandoned.  Certain stretches are now overgrown with over 200 species of flora and fauna”, vibrant with colourful flowers and greenery.  Bridges, tunnels, and the original tracks remain mostly untouched, hidden just beyond the streets and neighbourhoods of the outer arrondissements.  The rails haven’t been removed because the rail network may be resurrected one day.

• Smoke rises from Ortviken Paper Mill in Sundsvall, Sweden on a cold winter night.  The raw material for the Ortviken paper mill is fresh spruce pulpwood, mainly from Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget’s own forests in northern Sweden.  The production capacity is 880,000 tons of paper.  Energy extracted from Ortviken’s flue gas condenser provides surplus heat to the district heating network corresponding to the heating requirements of 5,000 single family houses per year.  The investment was a joint project with the Sundsvall municipality.  SCA Ortviken has 870 employees.
• Southern California has a fire season and sometimes this creates conditions of eerie orange light in the morning as smoke particles are filtered and scattered by the sunlight.  This creates unusual (and to some viewers unrealistic) colours.  This is a wave coloured by the smoke-filtered sunlight of dawn.
• This is one of the McNaught comets above Chile in 2007.  Since the article was about the upcoming visit of the Ison comet, which is supposed to be brighter than a full moon, I can only assume that this photo was included because Ison hasn’t arrived yet, so there aren’t any dramatic photos of it.  Comet Ison has taken millions of years to reach us, travelling from the Oort cloud — a reservoir of trillions and trillions of chunks of rock and ice, leftovers from the birth of the planets.  It reaches out more than a light-year — ¼ of the way to the nearest star.  In the Oort cloud, the sun is but a distant point of light whose feeble gravity is just enough to hold onto the cloud.  Every once in a while, a tiny tug of gravity, perhaps from a nearby star or wandering object, disturbs the cloud sending some of its comets out into interstellar space to be lost forever — but scattering a few sunward.  Comet Ison is making its first, and perhaps only, visit to us.  Its life has been cold, frozen hard, but that’s about to change as it moves closer to the sun.

• In November 2001, Bernard Marcus announced his vision of presenting Atlanta with an aquarium that would encourage both education and economic growth.  After visiting 56 aquariums in 13 countries, he donated $250 million toward what was to become the Georgia Aquarium.  Corporate contributions totalling an additional $40 million allowed the Aquarium to open debt free.  The world’s largest, it opened in 2005 and encompasses 550,000 square feet (5.1 hectares or 13 acres) of covered space; its tanks hold 8,000,000 US gallons (30,000 cubic metres) of fresh and salt water.  Its ballroom accommodates 1,100 seated guests (or 1,600 standing) and features two 10×28 feet (3×8.5 metre) windows into the whale shark and beluga whale exhibits.  Georgia Aquarium contains between 100,000 and 120,000 fish and other sea creatures, representing more than 500 species.  The Aquarium is the only institution outside of Asia housing whale sharks — as a whole, it was designed around the whale shark exhibit.  Animals are displayed in 6 galleries, each corresponding to a specific environment.
• Underwater scenes off the coast of South Africa were filmed by a photographer that was once a software architect [though I’m not sure why that matters].  Alexander Safonov has taken some remarkable photos.  He hails from Voronezh, Russia, but now works in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong.  He has also filmed off Fiji, Ecuador, India and elsewhere.
• From Current Biology: A species of stickleback fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus, prefer strong, fat and healthy leaders.  If a fish has parasites, black spots or doesn’t look well-fed he won’t be chosen leader.  Sticklebacks can be quite judgmental when it comes to looks.  A “handsome” fish” appears more trustworthy as evidenced by the fact that groups of 3 and 4 fish follow a leader randomly, but the larger the group, the stronger the bias toward following a healthier-looking fish.  When a group reaches 8, 80% of them choose to follow a “good” leader.  It’s thought that collective wisdom occurs because each individual has some pieces of information which, put all together, give a clearer picture.

• We have a flock of small birds — I’d say a small flock of small birds as they number only about 100 — that gather nightly in the ivy that thickly covers the 9-metre cement-block wall behind us.  They are in no way dependent on me for food.  Birds are messy, and best left alone (but I like them).  We let the cat out on the balcony to keep them away from our house.  Early mornings and at dusk, they chirp.  They all chirp.  Not in unison.  Actually. I find it a nice sound to hear in the city.
• Russian photographer Andrey Pavlov takes macro pictures of living ants by spending hours playing with them and posing them to get just the right shot.  He appears to treat them respectfully and they seem at ease around him (an odd skill).
• In the behaviour called anting, birds rub insects on their feathers, usually ants, which secrete liquids containing chemicals such as formic acid, that can act as insecticide, miticide, fungicide, bactericide, or to make them edible by removing the ants’ distasteful acid.  It possibly also supplements the bird’s own preen oil.  Perhaps the use of certain kinds of ants indicates the importance of the chemicals they release.  Some cases of anting involve the use of millipedes or puss moth caterpillars (these, too, are known to release powerful defensive chemicals).  Over 250 species of bird have been known to ant.  Some birds like antbirds and flickers not only ant, but also consume the ants as an important part of their diet.  Other opportunist ant-eating birds include sparrows, wrens, grouse, and starlings.

• Poseidon Sculpture, Neptunus Mansion, Nanshan District, Hai Huang Building: This is a sculpture in two parts (I don’t know that the sculpture doesn’t extend all the way through the building, but I expect not).  The photographer says, “Not many people notice the horses on the back.  Now I understand why a chariot sculpture was stuck on the front of the building.”  I spent far more time than I should’ve trying to find information on the sculptor or materials but could find nothing.
• A digital image from photographs made for a CD called “Where.”  The tree was in the redwoods and the doors are from Europe.
• 3-shot vertical panorama of Los Torres in Torres Del Paine National Park, Chilean Patagonia.  It took the photographer over 3 hours of hiking to reach this spot for sunrise; the colours changed rapidly within minutes.  Processed with emphasis on the golden glow cast in the moment.

• The door knob from Alice in Wonderland on a random building in Toontown at the Tokyo Dusney Resort.  When you turn the knob, his eyeballs move change.
• Modelled after the mudra (hand gestures) in classical Indian dance.  I presume they could both be installed going up (which would be my preference).
• Angel, Padua, Veneto, Italy.  This appears to be a door knocker, rather than a handle.  (So sue me.)

• I didn’t remember that chipmunks had such long tails.
• Door handles needn’t be small and subtle — this crab design spans the width of the door.  More suited to larger doors and those in restaurants and other commercial premises, the crab’s legs provide a range of handle heights, making it a great choice for any child-friendly premises.
• The only thing I could find about this is that it is considered “vintage”.