Entering a Black Hole: Video Simulation

• A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you’d see if you dared to wander close to a black hole. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine.

uncertaintimes:

World History Blog: Did Alexander the Great Fight the Yeti?:

While reading the Anabasis Alexandri (Robson translation) at the Ancient History Sourcebook at Fordham, I came upon a curious passage. It reads as though Alexander’s men, in the course of the invasion of India, fought a pitched battle with a tribe of Yeti! Very strange but it is indeed in the account from antiquity. Here is the passage that suggests Yeti’s, “Those captured were hairy, not only their heads but the rest of their bodies; their nails were rather like beasts’ claws; they used their nails (according to report) as if they were iron tools; with these they tore asunder their fishes, and even the less solid kinds of wood; everything else they cleft with sharp stones; for iron they did not possess. For clothing they wore skins of animals, some even the thick skins of the larger fishes.” Maybe they were just strange hairy men…

Here is a more complete account of the battle from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/arrian-bookVIII-India.html

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Perhaps related to the Alma people?

I’ve read two very interesting accounts of the Alma. Some have speculated that they were, or are, as some maintain, Neanderthal. You’ll have to forgive me because I cannot remember the sources.

One account was of a Russian military officer who took it upon himself to find the legendary Alma. He found a village where an Alma woman resided. He said that the men of the village would sneak out at night and have sex with her in her cottage. She had a young son who lifted the man off the ground in a chair with his jaws.

Another account was of an anthropologist who went looking for the Alma in Mongolia. She found a likely spot, according to the locals, where she would leave food and various items. She said that over time, the Alma would come out from the woods, root through the stuff, take what they wanted and leave things behind, including crafted items. I’m not sure what happened after that.

• According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation. As members of this planet’s menagerie, and a consequence of nearly 4 billion years of evolution, humans have a purpose to propagate life. After all, whatever else life is, it necessarily possesses an incessant drive for self-perpetuation. And the idea isn’t just fantasy: Mautner says that “directed panspermia” missions can be accomplished with present technology.
• “We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life,” Mautner explained to PhysOrg.com. “Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose.”
• As Mautner explains in his study published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cosmology, the strategy is to deposit an array of primitive organisms on potentially fertile planets and protoplanets throughout the universe. Like the earliest life on Earth, organisms such as cyanobacteria could seed other planets, digest toxic gases (such as ammonia and carbon dioxide on early Earth) and release products such as oxygen which promote the evolution of more complex species. To increase their chances of success, the microbial payloads should contain a variety of organisms with various environmental tolerances, and hardy multicellular organisms such as rotifer eggs to jumpstart higher evolution. These organisms may be captured into asteroids and comets in the newly forming solar systems and transported from there by impacts to planets as their host environments develop.
• Mautner has identified potential breeding grounds, which include extrasolar planets, accretion disks surrounding young stars that hold the gas and dust of future planets, and - at an even earlier stage - interstellar clouds that hold the materials to create stars.

Is Colonizing Mars an Imperative? Obama’s New Space Strategy Says “Yes”

• The Obama Administration unveiled its new far-sighted budget for NASA, which scraps moon missions but puts the focus on developing new space technologies, exploring the solar system with robots, and pushing humans closer to living offworld. All of which will be funded a budget increase to NASA of $6 billion over five years.
• Under the new budget, we’d see a revamped NASA program focused on scientific innovation, rather than recreating old experiments. Specifically, as NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said: We will invent and demonstrate large-scale, new and novel approaches to spaceflight such as in-orbit fuel depots and rendezvous and docking technologies, and closed-loop life support systems so that our future robotic and human exploration missions are both highly capable and more affordable … as well as providing $3 billion over five years for robotic exploration precursor missions that will pave the way for later human exploration of the moon, Mars and nearby asteroids.

Boa Sr was the last of the Bo, a tribe on the Andaman Islands

• When Boa Sr sang in her own language, the result was gently hypnotic. “The earth is shaking as the tree falls, with a great thud,” she sang, on a recording captured by linguists.
• But the grey-haired, 85-year-old woman will not be heard again. And neither will her native tongue – Bo – aside from the recordings that have already been made. Campaigners revealed yesterday that the recent death of Boa Sr on India’s remote Andaman Islands marked the end of the Bo tribe and the loss of a language.
• Boa Sr was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, an indigenous group of the Andamans, a cluster of islands 700 miles east of the Indian mainland in the Bay of Bengal. The Great Andamanese once numbered more than 5,000 and were made up of 10 distinct groups each with their own language.
• The Bo are believed to have lived on the islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them one of the oldest surviving human cultures. But today, after more than 150 years of contact with colonisers, the diseases they brought with them, and the disastrous impact of alcohol, the Great Andamanese number just 52.

RIP.

• Oil giant Chevron is facing defeat in a lawsuit by the people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, seeking redress for its dumping billions of gallons of poisonous waste in the rainforest.
  
  But the oil multinational has launched a last-ditch, dirty lobbying effort to derail the people’s case for holding polluters to account.
  
  Chevron’s new chief executive John Watson knows his brand is under fire – let’s turn up the global heat. Sign the petition below urging Chevron to clean up their toxic legacy, and it will be delivered directly to the company´s headquarters, their shareholders and the US media!

Sign the Petition.

• The trailer industry and lawmakers are pressing the government to send Haiti thousands of potentially formaldehyde-laced trailers left over from Hurricane Katrina — an idea denounced by some as a crass and self-serving attempt to dump inferior American products on the poor.
• “Just go ahead and sign their death certificate,” said Paul Nelson of Coden, Ala., who contends his mother died because of formaldehyde fumes in a FEMA trailer.
• The 100,000 trailers became a symbol of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s bungled response to Katrina. The government had bought the trailers to house victims of the 2005 storm, but after people began falling ill, high levels of formaldehyde, a chemical that is used in building materials and can cause breathing problems and perhaps cancer, were found inside. Many of the trailers have sat idle for years, and many are damaged.
• The U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating American assistance in Haiti, has expressed no interest in sending the trailers to the earthquake-stricken country. FEMA spokesman Clark Stevens declined to comment.
• In a Jan. 15 letter to FEMA, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said the trailers could be used as temporary shelter or emergency clinics.
• “While I continue to believe that these units should not be used for human habitation, I do believe that they could be of some benefit on a short-term, limited basis if the appropriate safeguards are provided,” he wrote.
• For the recreational-vehicle and trailer industry, which lost thousands of jobs during the recession, the push to send the units to Haiti is motivated by more than charity.
• Bidding is underway in an online government-run auction to sell the trailers in large lots at bargain-basement prices — something the RV industry fears will reduce demand for new products. Some of the bids received so far work out to less than $500 for a trailer that would sell for about $20,000 new.
• Lobbyists for the Recreational Vehicle Industry Assn. — which includes some major manufacturers in Elkhart, Ind., among them Gulf Stream — have been talking with members of Congress, the government and disaster relief agencies to see if it would be possible to send the trailers to Haiti instead.

• Here you will find hundreds of radical zines ready to print. You can also upload zines to the site ( zines with file sizes bigger than 7mb can be uploaded to http://indymedia.org and linked here). Feel free to comment and contribute.

Many categories, quite a resource for resistance thinking and doing.

• The world’s population is burning through the planet’s resources at such a reckless rate – about 28 per cent more last year - it will eventually cause environmental havoc, said the Worldwatch Institute, a US think-tank.
• In its annual State of the World 2010 report, it warned any gains from government action on climate change could be wiped out by the cult of consumption and greed unless changes in our lifestyle were made.
• Consumerism had become a “powerful driver” for increasing demand for resources and consequent production of waste, with governments, including the British, too readily wanting to promoted it as necessary for job creation and economic well-being.
• More than £2.8 trillion of stimulus packages had been poured into economies to pull the world out of the global recession, it found, with only a small amount into green measures.
• But the think tank warned that without a “wholesale transformation” of cultural patterns the world would not be able to “prevent the collapse of human civilisation”.
• The think tank found that over the past decade consumption of goods and services had risen by 28 per cent to $30.5 trillion (£19bn) - with the world digging up the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings of material every day.
• The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, many US two year-olds can recognise the McDonald’s “Golden Archers” sign, although they cannot read the letter, and an average western family spends more on their pet than by someone trying to live in Bangladesh.

• The New Economics Foundation (Nef) said “unprecedented and probably impossible” carbon reductions would be needed to hold temperature rises below 2C (3.6F).
• Scientists say exceeding this limit could lead to dangerous global warming.
• “We urgently need to change our economy to live within its environmental budget,” said Nef’s policy director.
• Andrew Simms added: “There is no global, environmental central bank to bail us out if we become ecologically bankrupt.”
• None of the existing models or policies could “square the circle” of economic growth with climate safety, Nef added.
• Magic bullets - such as carbon capture and storage, nuclear or even geo-engineering - are potentially dangerous distractions from more human-scale solutions,” said co-author Victoria Johnson, Nef’s lead researcher for the climate change and energy programme.
• She added that there was growing support for community-scale projects, such as decentralised energy systems, but support from governments was needed.
• “At the moment, magic bullets… are getting much of the funding and political attention, but are missing the targets,” Dr Johnson said.
• “Our research shows that to prevent runaway climate change, this needs to change.”
• The report concluded that an economy that respected environmental thresholds, which include biodiversity and the finite availability of natural resources, would be better placed to deliver human well-being in the long run.
• Tom Clougherty, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-thank, said Nef’s report exhibited “a complete lack of understanding of economics and, indeed, human development”.
• “It is precisely this economic growth which will lift the poor out of poverty and improve the environmental standards that really matter to people - like clean air and water - in the process, as it has done throughout human history,” he told BBC News.
• “There’s only one good thing I can say for the Nef’s report, and that’s that it is honest. Its authors admit that they want us to be poorer and to lead more restricted lives for the sake of their faddish beliefs.”

(Mr. Clougherty, could you point out for us a time in human history when economic growth wiped poverty clean from the planet and did no environmental damage?)

Marvels from Mars: Stunning postcards from the Red Planet

• “Devil’s punch bowl? The mouth of Albor Tholus, an extinct volcano, is 30km across”