A little break

Happy New Year! Xeno is taking a few days off from blogging
to explore an underground city and to make plans for 2011.

China makes Skype illegal

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90778/90860/7246526.html
Beyond protecting state owned carriers, is this move also to limit those who can spy on phone calls in China?  What happened with that Skype outage recently?

Earlier today Skype had gone down for millions of users. Skype has now issued a statement on how and why this happened. They explained that Skype relies on connections between millions of computers or phones. Some computers act as “Supernodes” which help locate the person that you are trying to connect to. For some reason today many users were taken offline because of a Skype version mismatch. So Skype engineers had to bring up many “mega-supernodes” to help counteract the downtime today. So if Skype isn’t up for you yet, it should be returning to normal shortly.

via techgoblin

What was that “problem affecting some versions of Skype”?

Denisovans Were Neanderthals’ Cousins, DNA Analysis Reveals

The entire genome of the Denisovans was extracted from a tooth and finger bone.

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.

All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them.

“It’s an incredibly exciting finding,” said Carlos Bustamante, a Stanford University geneticist who was not involved in the research. …

via Denisovans Were Neanderthals’ Cousins, DNA Analysis Reveals – NYTimes.com.

Milky Way’s Galactic Neighbourhood Puzzles Astronomers

There’s something odd about our galactic neighbourhood, which Sidney van den Bergh at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada highlights today in a short paper.

Astronomers have long known that the Milky Way’s two closest neighbours are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, giant clouds of stars, gas and dust called irregular galaxies.

This is strange for two reasons. These galaxies are much younger than ours and may have even formed together. It looks as if they may just be passing by, on their way to somewhere else. Most other galaxies like ours, such as Andromeda, don’t have a single companion like this, so having two seems rather fortunate.

But there’s something else as well. The Large Magellanic cloud is unusually luminous. In fact, there are only two other irregular galaxies in the entire local universe that come close. “In other words the Large Magellanic Cloud seems to be close to the upper luminosity limit for irregular galaxies,” says van den Bergh. That’s unusual too.

In recent years, astronomers have begun to work out just how rare this is. Sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey allow astronomers to work out the distribution of various types of galaxy. They’ve looked at 22581 galaxies like the Milky Way and found that 81% have no satellite galaxies as bright as the Magellanic Clouds, 11% have one such satellite, and only 3.5% host two such satellite galaxies. …

via Milky Way’s Galactic Neighbourhood Puzzles Astronomers  – Technology Review.

Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables

Neanderthals cooked and ate plants and vegetables, a new study of Neanderthal remains reveals.

Researchers in the US have found grains of cooked plant material in their teeth.

The study is the first to confirm that the Neanderthal diet was not confined to meat and was more sophisticated than previously thought.

The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The popular image of Neanderthals as great meat eaters is one that has up until now been backed by some circumstantial evidence. Chemical analysis of their bones suggested they ate little or no vegetables.

This perceived reliance on meat had been put forward by some as one of the reasons these humans become extinct as large animals such as mammoths declined due to an Ice Age.

But a new analysis of Neanderthal remains from across the world has found direct evidence that contradicts the chemical studies. Researchers found fossilised grains of vegetable material in their teeth and some of it was cooked.

Although pollen grains have been found before on Neanderthal sites and some in hearths, it is only now there is clear evidence that plant food was actually eaten by these people. …

via BBC News – Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables.

Project: A personal home airspace radar detector

Goal: Create a device and software to show me, preferably on a web page I can check from any location, a radar image of anything flying over my house. I want to see and record the size, speed and altitude of … birds, bats, jets, airplanes, meteors, UFOs, whatever I can see.

Notes:

1. Types and basics of Radar on Wikipedia.

2. Note on aircraft radar from HowStuffWorks “Uses of Radar”:

Radio waves travel at the speed of light, roughly 1,000 feet per microsecond; so if the radar set has a good high-speed clock, it can measure the distance of the airplane very accurately. Using special signal processing equipment, the radar set can also measure the Doppler shift very accurately and determine the speed of the airplane.

The radar antenna sends out a short, high-power pulse of radio waves at a known frequency. When the waves hit an object, they echo off of it and the speed of the object Doppler-shifts the echo. The same antenna is used to receive the much-weaker signals that return.

3. Hacking the Hot Wheels Radar Gun, by Ed Paradis:

The Hot Wheels Radar Gun is a real radar gun currently (Feb 2007) available from Walmart and other retailers for about $30 (USD). It is a real radar gun, operating at 10.525 GHz capable of clocking cars, people, pets, and toys. …

The module constantly transmits 10.525GHz when supplied power. The module then receives the reflected signal and mixes it with the transmit oscillator. The result is a sinusoid with a frequency equal to the diffrence in frequency of the transmitted and received signal. (Also the sum of the two frequencies is present, but the 21.050 GHz signal is filtered or otherwise lost in the module.)

If the tranmitted signal is bounced off something that is moving, then you can find the speed of the object by measuring the frequency of the output. Thats how the radar gun works in the first place. Read up on “Doppler Radar” to learn more. …

Fake Terror Update

Wal-Mart Invasion Part of Larger DHS Takeover of America

YouTube – Wal-Mart Invasion Part of Larger DHS Takeover of America.

I already don’t fly because I don’t want to get irradiated or groped. If they move those cancer causing scanners into shopping malls to reduce our population, I sincerely hope that  people freak out en mass and put a stop to it.

Because I am aware of this danger, I will never submit toairport scanners, even if I have to have a pat-down or cancel my flight plans. They call it “Back-Scatter”, but it is really full-body, penetrating x-rays. Radiation accumulates in the body during one’s lifetime and when it reaches a certain level, cancer is nearly certain. … Officials must naturally defend compulsory passenger X-rays as harmless. But they are signing no guarantees because ionizing radiation in the X-ray spectrum damages and mutates both chromosomal DNA and structural proteins in human cells. If this damage is not repaired, it can lead to cancer. New research shows that even very low doses of X-ray can delay or prevent cellular repair of damaged DNA, raising questions about the safety of routine medical X-rays. Unborn babies can become grotesquely disfigured if their mothers are irradiated during pregnancy. Heavily X- rayed persons of childbearing age can sustain chromosomal damage, endangering offspring. Radiation damage is cumulative and each successive dose builds upon the cellular mutation caused by the last. It can take years for radiation damage to manifest pathology.
A leading U.S. expert on the biological effects of X-radiation is Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Gofman?s exhaustive research leads him to conclude that there is NO SAFE DOSE-LEVEL of ionizing radiation. His studies indicate that radiation from medical diagnostics and treatment is a causal co-factor in 50 percent of America?s cancers and 60 percent of our ischemic (blood flow blockage) heart disease. He stresses that the frequency with which Americans are medically X-rayed ?makes for a significant radiological impact.?
This highly credentialed nuclear physicist states: ?The fact, that X-ray doses are so seldom measured, reflects the false assumption that doses do not matter?[but] they do matter enormously. And each bit of additional dose matters, because any X-ray photon may be the one which sets in motion the high-speed, high energy electron which causes a carcinogenic or atherogenic[smooth muscle] mutation.

via blackvoices.com

The FCC’s Threat to Internet Freedom

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government’s reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.

How did the FCC get here?

For years, proponents of so-called “net neutrality” have been calling for strong regulation of broadband “on-ramps” to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.

Nothing is broken that needs fixing, however. The Internet has been open and freedom-enhancing since it was spun off from a government research project in the early 1990s. Its nature as a diffuse and dynamic global network of networks defies top-down authority. Ample laws to protect consumers already exist. Furthermore, the Obama Justice Department and the European Commission both decided this year that net-neutrality regulation was unnecessary and might deter investment in next-generation Internet technology and infrastructure.

Analysts and broadband companies of all sizes have told the FCC that new rules are likely to have the perverse effect of inhibiting capital investment, deterring innovation, raising operating costs, and ultimately increasing consumer prices. Others maintain that the new rules will kill jobs. By moving forward with Internet rules anyway, the FCC is not living up to its promise of being “data driven” in its pursuit of mandates—i.e., listening to the needs of the market. …

On this winter solstice, we will witness jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah as the FCC bypasses branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation. The darkest day of the year may end up marking the beginning of a long winter’s night for Internet freedom.

Mr. McDowell is a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.

via Robert M. McDowell: The FCC’s Threat to Internet Freedom – WSJ.com.

Comment:

Unfortunately the forces of big money and monopolization own the FCC along with most of the rest of our government. Basically we are looking at a rather rapid national decline across a wide spectrum of economic, environmental, and quality of life conditions over the next 20-30 years.  … Really other than a major throwing out the bums in Congress and replacing them with liberal populists who won’t shy away from standing up to big business we should probably just learn Chinese.

A proposal establishing rules on net neutrality will be voted on by the Federal Communications Commission on Dec. 21. At issue are pay to play rules giving Internet service providers the power to charge higher prices for more bandwidth. The FCC net neutrality vote seeks a middle ground that prevents outright blocking of content but recognizes the need to manage data-hogging video and peer-to-peer traffic.Currently the FCC has no authority to regulate the Internet. The net neutrality proposal will be used to present Internet regulation legislation to Congress. An explosion in video and P2P traffic, along with the proliferation of smartphones and networked tablet devices, has put a strain on available bandwidth. ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon support a pay-to-play system that allows them to control congestion by charging customers more for a so called “Internet fast lane.” With bandwidth demand exploding, ISP have already started charging content providers and throttling P2P traffic. The content providers say such a two-tiered Internet is unfair and should be illegal.Giant ISPs have already been planning how to exploit the FCC proposal. DailyTech reports that a presentation by suppliers to AT&T and Verizon was leaked outlining a two-tiered Internet. The strategy includes charging mobile data customers extra monthly fees per web page accessed and per MB consumed, plus YouTube, Facebook and Skype access fees. The presentation also recommends that ISPs create their own social network and video sites and offer their customers free access for choosing those instead.

via PeraonalMoneyStore.com

Your life probably depends on keeping the Internet free. You just don’t know it yet.

 

Sir Elton John becomes father via surrogate

Sir Elton John and his partner have become parents to a son born to a surrogate mother in California.

Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John was born on Christmas Day, the UK musician and his Canadian husband David Furnish told the Usmagazine.com website.

“Zachary is healthy and doing really well, and we are very proud and happy parents,” said the couple.

They provided no details about the surrogacy arrangement.

“We are overwhelmed with happiness and joy at this very special moment,” the couple told the website in a statement.

They said the boy weighed 7lb15oz (3.6kg) …

via BBC News – Sir Elton John becomes father via surrogate.

I hope they picked a mother with extraordinary musical talent.