Discovering the hidden DVD player in your Prius

My GPS navigation system has a DVD player of its very own hidden in the car. I just found it today and popped out the disk.

Here is what it looks like.

I can read it in my computer and the version file matches the DATA ver.07.1 printed on the label.

The newest version from the dealer (10.1 with 11.1 due out “Fall 2011″) costs $200. I don’t want to spend that much. Also, I’ve heard some people had their map shifted by 100ft or more so the previous locations did not work and so the system gave wrong directions after the upgrade. (Just a rumor.)

With the 2009 Prius you are looking for a GEN 5 DVD. The GEN is your hardware generation and it doesn’t ever change for your car.

Some people are hacking these DVDs to unlock the GPS system so you can use it while in motion, and so you can play ordinary movie DVDs that show up on your NAV screen.

Both seem like bad ideas, but I like hacking things just to see if it can be done. For example, can I turn on the reverse video camera feed while moving forward? I totally want to do that.

I wouldn’t watch movies while driving, but there are times when I start rolling and I have one more number to enter for an address in the GPS and the system shuts off. I hate that. I would like to be able to override it.

Google for instructions, but heed this: if your Prius accelerates without warning and kills you after you hack it with a file downloaded from some Russian or Chinese web site, you’ll have only yourself to blame.

Dancing mania

Sometime in mid-July 1518 a woman stepped into one of Strasbourg’s streets and began dancing. Within a week another thirty four had joined her. By end of August, it is said that 400 people had experienced the madness, dancing uncontrollably around the city.

Local physicians were consulted. They excluded astrological and supernatural causes, declaring it to be a ‘natural disease’ caused by ‘hot blood’; treatment: more dancing. In an echo of the raves that would prove so popular five hundred years later, two guildhalls and an outdoor grain market were cleared so the afflicted could dance freely and uninterrupted. Musicians were provided.

When dancers began to die the governors rethought their strategy. A new diagnosis was made; the dancing was now attributed to a curse sent down by an angry saint. In contrition gambling, gaming and prostitution were banned and the dissolute banished. When this proved ineffective the dancers were despatched to a mountaintop shrine and divine intervention was requested. In the following weeks the epidemic finally abated.

The first major outbreak of dancing mania is thought to have taken place in Aachen, Germany on June 24 1374 after which it spread quickly through France, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. Outbreaks virtually always struck close to earlier similarly effected sites. Maastricht, Trier, Zurich and Strasbourg each experienced two or more episodes. Thousands of people danced in agony for days or weeks, screaming of terrible visions and imploring religious leaders to save their souls.

It seems unbelievable today, but there is no question that these epidemics did occur. Dozens of reliable chronicles from several towns and cities describe the events of 1374.

No consensus exists as to the condition’s aetiology. One theory is that sufferers had ingested ergot, a mould that grows on stalks of ripening rye and can cause hallucinations, spasms, and tremors. Epidemics of ergotism are known to have occurred in mediaeval Europe when people ate contaminated flour. But it is unlikely that those poisoned by ergot could have danced for days at a time and nor would so many people have reacted to its psychotropic chemicals in the same way. …

via Dancing mania | Frontier Psychiatrist.

Brazilian scientists investigate Beethoven’s cancer-fighting properties

Research underway at the Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is investigating whether music might be able to fight cancer.

Dr. Márcia Alves Marques Capella and colleagues performed a series of tests in 2010, exposing dish-cultures of both healthy and cancerous cells to audio playbacks of various music genres. In repeated tests, Dr. Capella found that recordings of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor destroyed around 20% of cancerous cells within a few days – yet the healthy cells were unharmed. A similar result was obtained with ‘Atmosphères’ composed by György Ligeti in 1961. But, curiously perhaps, no measurable changes in cell growth were found for Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major. Possible mechanisms which might have produced the results are as yet entirely unknown – though it’s speculated that they could be related to the rhythm, frequency or intensity of the music. The team plans further tests beginning in April 2011 …

via Brazilian scientists investigate Beethoven’s cancer-fighting properties.

I wondered about this ten years ago in my article about Raymond Royal Rife’s supposed cancer cure:

Does our Western Musical Scale Encode Lost Healing Arts?

What if … the major scale was picked by the ancients because they knew the curative powers of certain frequencies in that scale? What if we have drifted off of the correct frequencies in all of these years? Look at the musical scale above, compare it to the frequencies that Rife claimed would vibrate cancer germs to death, and decide for yourself. Can these audio frequencies open some sort of secret door?

Here it is… in the right key…  Some versions on youtube are wrongly pitch shifted so they are no longer in C minor.) I haven’t checked it with a tuner,  but this one just feels right and the person who uploaded it says … ” the video was wrong pichted because of it’s age or what ever when it was downloaded on youtube.I just re-pitched the sound track into the true C minor!”

Beethoven symphony 5 in the real tune : C minor

Ah, but there is one lingering question… did Dr. Capella use the true C minor or the C# minor recording to kill the cancer? Hmmm…

Well, the true C just feels right.  Here’s the other composition that worked:

New Car Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry

Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer’s green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.

However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.

The engine has a rotor that’s equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy.

The Wave Disk Generator uses 60 percent of its fuel for propulsion; standard car engines use just 15 percent. As a result, the generator is 3.5 times more fuel efficient than typical combustion engines.

Researchers estimate the new model could shave almost 1,000 pounds off a car’s weight currently taken up by conventional engine systems.

Last week, the prototype was presented to the energy division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is backing the Michigan State University Engine Research Laboratory with $2.5 million in funding.

Michigan State’s team of engineers hope to have a car-sized 25-kilowatt version of the prototype ready by the end of the year.

via New Car Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry : Discovery News.

1866 Letter: Honest Abe Lincoln was not a Christian

He won the Civil War, ended slavery, had his bust carved into Mount Rushmore and now beams from five dollar bills. But the God-fearing patriots of Middle America are about to receive a reminder that Abraham Lincoln had a strained relationship with one of their most respected institutions: organised religion.

A three-page letter highlighting the 16th president’s unconventional relationship with the Almighty has just been put on sale. It offers a possible insight into why he was never baptised, did not attend a church and, in defiance of political protocol of the era, would refuse to publicly discuss his spiritual beliefs. Such was his reluctance to embrace piety that, if he were standing for office today, there is a good chance he would be unelectable.

The letter was written by William Herndon, a legal partner and close friend of “Honest Abe” in 1866, a year after Lincoln had been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. And while the letter is at pains to stress that Lincoln did believe in “a God” at the time of his death, it reveals that he took a long time getting to that point. “Mr Lincoln’s religion is too well known to me to allow even a shadow of a doubt; he is, or was, a Theist and a Rationalist, denying all extraordinary, supernatural inspiration or revelation,” it reads, before detailing the president’s spiritual evolution in the years after Herndon met him in Springfield, Illinois, in the 1840s.

“At one time in his life, to say the least, he was an elevated Pantheist, doubting the immortality of the soul as the Christian world understands that term. He believed that the soul lost its identity and was immortal as a force. Subsequent to this, he rose to the belief of a God, and this is all the change he ever underwent. I speak knowing what I say. He was a noble man – a good great man for all this.”

Historians have long debated Lincoln’s religious views, and how they affected his political career. He was born into a humble Kentucky family in 1809 and raised as a Baptist, but became sceptical and rejected organised religion. He never joined a church in his adult life. …

A couple of decades after Lincoln’s death, several biographers attempted to portray him as a Christian. They were helped by the fact that he often quoted the Bible during speeches.

In today’s political environment, it is almost unthinkable that someone could be elected president without being a member of a congregation. Barack Obama, who cites Lincoln as a political hero, regularly attends churches in Chicago and Washington, even if roughly a half of Republican voters (according to several polls) believe he is a Muslim – despite the fact that he smokes, occasionally drinks, and eats pork….

via ‘Pantheist’ Lincoln would be unelectable today – Americas, World – The Independent.

Voyager 1 mission: A new frontier in quest to understand the cosmos

In a small room at Caltech, space physicist Ed Stone and four of his colleagues puzzle over a trove of data that has just arrived from the bulbous edge of the solar system.

“What, exactly, are we looking at?” Stone asks.

The data form a map of invisible matter, a slush of atomic particles once part of stars that exploded around 10 million years ago. The information has come from Voyager 1, the spindly little spacecraft that rocketed from Florida more than 30 years before and is still traveling, farther from Earth than any human-made object ever has.

Stone and his associates are stumped. “What are we going to find?” Stone wonders. “Right now, I don’t think anybody knows.”

The godfather of the interstellar mission called Voyager is now 75. He is rail thin, and his shoulders have a faint slope. A crown of gray hair circles the top of his otherwise bald head. He is wearing his standard work attire: gray sport jacket, gray pants, gray shoes, gray socks — and a white shirt.

Despite his uncertainty, his voice is calm. “Eventually,” he assures the others, “we’re going to figure this out.”

Stone is agnostic about God, but has a belief that knowing about the cosmos brings deeper understanding of Earth. Although he and the other scientists might not comprehend Voyager’s observations right now, experience tells him their meanings will be divined.

He also believes they will learn much more. Voyager 1 is close to bursting out of the solar system. Once it makes it beyond the influence of the sun, the spacecraft will enter part of the universe that scientists have only been able speculate about: Deep space.

“We’re very, very close,” Stone says, after the meeting with his collaborators. “We can’t say for sure how long it is going to take to get there. My best guess is four years, maybe five.”

That would make him 79 or 80. Projections have fallen short at times during this mission. Deep space still might be a decade away.

“Will I be around when Voyager finally makes it?” Stone draws a breath. For a moment, he is silent. …

What he lacks in zippy personality, his colleagues say, he makes up for by usually being the smartest — and most humble — person in the room. Few, if anyone, can recall him losing his cool or even being mildly dejected. “He is a leader regarded as above the fray,” says science writer Timothy Ferris, who helped Sagan create the Voyager discs.

“Stone is pretty much universally admired, and that is very unusual for someone in his position.”

In 2001, at age 65, Stone retired from JPL and returned to Caltech to teach physics. By then, much of the machinery on the Voyagers had been shuttered to save power for the final push. Their next important discoveries would come only as they began escaping the solar system.

Science has created models of deep space, but no one can say for sure what it is like — its temperatures, its composition or the speed of its interstellar wind. Most important, no one knows exactly how deep space relates to the formation of Earth.

Stone, still the lead scientist, oversees a slimmed-down Voyager team — about 20 researchers who must find time for the mission among their other projects. Some are at Caltech and JPL, others at universities and laboratories scattered across the country.

They follow the probes, especially Voyager 1, with mounting interest. Running on dwindling plutonium, using antiquated computers and recording data on eight-track tapes that get sent to Earth on faint radio waves, Voyager 2 races through space about 9 billion miles away and Voyager 1, 11 billion.

If it reaches deep space, scientists will ask Voyager 1 to perform one more great task before it runs out of power, to use a collection of measuring devices, including one known as a cosmic-ray spectrometer, which Stone helped design, to gather information and send it back to Earth. Humans then will have their first definitive look at the great beyond. ….

via Voyager 1 mission: A new frontier in quest to understand the cosmos – latimes.com.

Explanation of the Court Trial Against Me

I have to tell the world right now, there is a story going around that I am going to be in jail, which is a complete misunderstanding.

Last year, we were taking bids from different companies to run a book store inside the Egyptian Museum. There is a person, who was renting a bookstore inside the Museum. He wanted to stop the bidding process, because he thought he should keep his contract. This person filed a case with the Misdemeanor Court in Agouza, Cairo, in order to stop the bidding process. This case was filed against the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), not against me personally, but against the role I was holding at that time.

However, before the case came to trial, the bidding process ended at the end of May 2010, and the Supreme Council of Antiquities (now the Ministry of State for Antiquities) chose a company, the Egyptian Sound and Light Company, to run the bookstore. Shortly after this decision was made, the court trial happened, at the beginning of June, so the SCA representatives did not have time to present evidence that the bidding had finished. Therefore, the court made a ruling that the bidding should stop. However, it was too late to do anything.

He still wanted to get his way, so this person continued to bring action against me in the court. In November 2010, the court made a ruling, that I was innocent, because as the Secretary General of the SCA, I was not in charge of legal affairs at the SCA, this was under the control of the Ministry of Culture at that time. But this was not enough for this person, he brought the case to the court again, claiming he had evidence that I was in fact in charge of legal affairs, and this time, the SCA did not have a legal representative present at the court. The court made the current ruling that I, as head of the SCA, was sentenced to a year in jail. This is how the court in Egypt works, and this is not an uncommon thing that the head of an organization gets sentenced like this. When a ruling like this is made, the defendant (in this case myself as Secretary General of the SCA at that time) has a certain amount of time to appeal the decision of the court.

Tomorrow, the head of the Legal Affairs Department at the Ministry of Antiquities will go to the court to file our appeal. He will present evidence that the bid for the bookstore contract was finished before the original court ruling, so therefore we could not follow the ruling to stop the bidding. We already had completed the bidding! I have every confidence that this matter will be cleared up very soon, so I want to tell everyone not to worry. I respect the laws of my country very highly, and the rulings of our courts. I intend to handle this matter entirely within our legal system. Nothing will cause me to lose focus from my goal of protecting the sites of Egypt.

via Explanation of the Court Trial Against Me | drhawass.com – Zahi Hawass.

I’ve liked him ever since I got the chance to talk to him in person about carbon dating the great pyramid. I think I caught him off guard by asking for a specific detail about the dating process he used, but he answered and gave me some advice I could use as well. I do hope he gets this resolved soon and, obviously, that he doesn’t have to go to jail. His statement is very clear.

Hello? … it’s Alan calling, Alan from Earth….

Yeah, Hello? Uh, if you’re there pick up, okay listen it’s Alan calling, Alan from Earth. You probably don’t remember, it’s over in the western spiral of the Milky Way although obviously you might have named it after a completely different brand of chocolate. Basically just find the Oort Cloud and ask for directions from there. Anyway just calling to catch up. We’re doing alright with the carbon base lifeform thing. Kids are diversifying nicely, going through a bit of a fad for spines and brains at the minute but it’s probably the same where you are. Well, that’s about it really, we just hadn’t heard from you in a while, like when we killed Michael Rennie or Klaatu, as you knew him in The Day The Earth Stood Still. So if you received this, get in touch, but actually thinking about it, don’t bother calling after about, what, 2150, because I’m not expecting anyone to be in. Oh and I’m sending this song along it’s called God Song by Robert Wyatt. I hope you like it. And that you don’t communicate through perfume or minor variatrions in your sense of balance or something. Okay, you take care and I’ll talk to you soon. Love you, Bye.

via The Daily Grail

Lyrics to the God Song. Great stuff!

God Song (Wyatt, Miller)

What on earth are you doing God? is this some sort of joke you’re playing?
Is it ’cause we didn’t pray?
Well I can’t see the point of the words without the action
Are you just hot air breathing over us? and overall
is it fun watching us all?
Where’s your son? we want him again
Next time you send your boy down here
Give him a wife and a sexy daughter – someone we can understand
Who’s got some ideas we use really relate to
we’ve all read your rules – tried them. Learned them in school then tried them
They’re impossible rules you’ve made us look fools
Well done God but now please
don’t hunt me down for heaven’s sake! You know that I’m only joking. Aren’t I?
Pardon me – I’m very drunk but I know what I’m trying to say
And It’s nearly night time and we’re still alone waiting
For something unknown Still waiting
So throw down a stone or something
Give us a sign for Christ’s sake

Web creator’s net neutrality fear

The inventor of the web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed.

He been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype.

Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow.

“If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate,” he said.

“It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law.”

Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.

Two tier

Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet.

Sir Tim said that he understands the need for traffic management but any move to discriminate between different content businesses would be a step too far.

“What you lose when you do that is you lose the open market,” he said.

“What the companies gain is that they get complete control of you.”

But Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute warned that enshrining net neutrality in law had its dangers.

“Once you allow the state in, you open the door to all sorts of regulation of the internet controls on content creation,” he said.

Sir Tim, who was speaking at the opening of the World Wide Web Consortium’s UK offices in Oxford, said that internet access was now becoming a human right.

At the same time it was also a very powerful tool for either a government or a large company to get to control of.

He warned that this could lead to users being blocked from visiting sites that were not politically correct, or religiously correct, or commercially correct. …

via BBC News – Web creator’s net neutrality fear.

Virus and low sunlight ‘raises multiple sclerosis risk’

Low levels of sunlight coupled with glandular fever could increase the risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), say researchers.

There are many suspected risk factors for MS and the disease is known to be more common away from the equator.

The study, in Neurology, suggested that low levels of sunlight could affect how the body responds to infection.

The MS Society said the study, based on hospital admissions data in England, added weight to existing evidence.

MS affects about 100,000 people in the UK and is more common in the north of England than in the south.

There are also high levels of both vitamin D deficiency and MS in Scotland, where the MS Society is considering carrying out separate research on a possible link between the two. Around 10,500 people have MS in the country, the highest prevalence of the condition in the world.

With MS the protective layer around nerves, known as the myelin sheath, becomes damaged. Messages from the brain to the rest of the body are disrupted, resulting in difficulty moving, muscle weakness and blurred vision.

The researchers at the University of Oxford looked at all hospital admissions in England between 1998 and 2005.

They found 56,681 MS cases and 14,621 cases of glandular fever, which is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus.

The study also used data from Nasa on sunlight intensity.

The researchers found that by just analysing sunlight, they could explain 61% of the variation in the number of MS cases across England.

However when they combined the effect of sunlight and glandular fever, 72% of the variation in MS cases could be explained….

via BBC News – Virus and low sunlight ‘raises multiple sclerosis risk’.