LedgerGermane

• A new battery, small and thin, weighs almost nothing and can be printed in a process similar to silk-screening shirts.
• The printable battery is expected to cheap and easy to mass produce and could be used in disposable receipts or cards, engineers in Germany announced today.
• “Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each,” said Andreas Willert, of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS, where Reinhard Baumann led the battery’s development.
• The battery weighs less than 1 gram and is less than 1 millimeter thick. It runs at 1.5 volts. Placing several in a row can produce up to 6 volts.
• A standard AAA battery weighs about 11.5 grams and also runs at 1.5 volts.

buffleheadcabin:retropolitics:

Mark Potok | Hatewatch

It’s been a remarkable few months in the world of domestic terrorism and the radical right. Since the election of Barack Obama last November, six law enforcement officers — three Pittsburgh police officers, two Okaloosa County, Fla., sheriff’s deputies, and a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. — have been murdered, allegedly by right-wing extremists. There has been a spate of Obama assassination plots, and a physician who provided abortions was shot to death in his own Kansas church. And a number of recent reports from federal and other law enforcement agencies have pointed out that the radical right seems to be growing increasingly dangerous, findings that jibe with a February analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center that documents the rise of hate groups since 2000.

In light of these incidents, the Southern Poverty Law Center today releases a sweeping review of terrorism and other serious violence that has emanated from the domestic radical right since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The special report — “Terror From the Right: 75 Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City” —shows that domestic right-wing terrorism is far more prevalent than most Americans realize. The report begins with a short introduction that is followed by summary descriptions of each of the 75 cases.

• For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.
• The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society — a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities — and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.
• After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson’s cipher emerged — 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher’s text:
• “In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events…”
• That, of course, is the beginning — with a few liberties taken — to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself.

• With all eyes suddenly on Honduras over the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya, few were paying attention when President Barack Obama quietly met with Colombian president and staunch U.S. ally Alvaro Uribe this week.
• Uribe knows something about changing a constitution to stay in office. In 2004, his powerful supporters in the Colombian Congress passed legislation to amend the 1991 constitution in order to allow the popular president to seek a second four-year term. Though controversial, the new law was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court, and in 2006, Uribe won the presidential election in a landslide.
• It’s an alarming prospect. Since Uribe’s first re-election, reports have surfaced that members of Congress were bribed by his administration to vote for his re-election bid. The accusations add to a mind-boggling litany of charges against Uribe, whose government has been linked to right-wing paramilitaries for years — and whose military continues to kill innocent civilians and then dress up their corpses as FARC guerillas.
• Add to that a series of intelligence scandals — including a wiretapping probe targeting politicians and journalists — and one would think it might be time to distance the U.S. from the man George W. Bush liked to call “mi amigo.”
• Yet Obama greeted Uribe warmly at the White House this week, praising him for his “diligence and courage” and speaking optimistically about the passage of a free trade agreement — a measure presidential-candidate Obama opposed on human rights grounds.

(via thedaytheytriedtokillme)

• Late last year, James Walbert went to court, to stop his former business associate from blasting him with mind-altering electromagnetic radiation. Walbert told the Sedgwick County, Kansas panel that Jeremiah Redford threatened him with “jolts of radiation” after a disagreement over a business deal. Later, Walbert, said, he began feeling electric shock sensations, hearing electronically generated tones, and getting popping and ringing sounds in his ears. On December 30th, the court decided in Walbert’s favor, and issued a first-of-its-kind order of protection, banning Redford from using “electronic means” to further harass Walbert. No, seriously.

Mind control on the real tip

• Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne identified key events in Enron’s demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails’ content.
• Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before….
• Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.