The Chang Tang Nature Reserve, situated 12,000 feet above sea level in the northwestern part of China's Tibetan Plateau, features bitter cold, sparse vegetation, cutting winds, and little water. Scientists have now obtained preliminary evidence that people nonetheless colonized this forbidding territory near the end of the Stone Age. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET
The discovery of stone tools and spear points, as well as the remains of temporary camps dated to between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago, indicates that late-Stone Age groups adapted to some of the planet's harshest environments, says archaeologist P. Jeffrey Brantingham of the Santa Fe (N.M.) Institute.
"We've probably underestimated the diversity of hunter-gatherer adaptations to extreme environments during the late Stone Age," Brantingham remarks. He and his colleagues, John W. Olsen of the University of Arizona in Tucson and George B. Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City, describe their new findings in the June Antiquity.
Ecological field surveys, which Schaller directed in the mid-1990s in the Chang Tang Reserve, yielded nearly 400 stone artifacts. Surveyors found the implements lying on the ground at 18 widely separated locations, most in the reserve's eastern section.
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The finds include a variety of sharpened blades and spear points, ranging from about three-fourths of an inch to 3 inches long. Investigators also found round stones from which blades and other implements had been pounded off. The Chang Tang blades bear signs of extensive resharpening and were apparently recycled for different types of jobs, the researchers say.
Brantingham and Olsen conducted initial excavations at several Chang Tang sites last summer. Radiocarbon dates for human occupation come from charcoal found in hearths at these locations.
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When the two scientists return to the sites in September, they'll probe for clues about the late Stone Age's climate and environment. Some researchers, suspecting the area was covered by an ice sheet during the late Stone Age, have doubted that people could have settled there then.
Brantingham proposes, however, that hunter-gatherers lived in this region by successfully contending with severe cold and scant water supplies. The size and shapes of their stone blades and spear points suggest that they hunted available game, such as antelopes and yak, he says.
"I believe that the Tibetan Plateau had a late [Stone Age] human occupation, as the new data suggest," says archaeologist Mark Aldenderfer of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He asserts that researchers should find sites on the plateau with multiple layers showing occupations over time. Aldenderfer is currently traveling to the Tibetan Plateau in an attempt to do just that. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
reno 4.ren.0002003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
More than 30 years ago, Russian investigators dug up the remains of several human camps situated along the Kamchatka River in eastern Siberia and dated them to as early as 14,000 years ago. These ancient settlements, dubbed the Ushki sites, have been viewed as possible launching pads for pioneering treks into North America much earlier than 11,000 years ago, the date at which archaeologists have traditionally assumed the New World was first settled. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com
However, new work doesn't support the idea that people lived at the Ushki camps well before that time. Radiocarbon dating of ancient charcoal found at an Ushki site excavated in 2000 by a joint team from Russia and the United States indicates that residents first arrived at the site between 11,300 and 11,000 years ago, says Ted Goebel of the University of Nevada, Reno. A subsequent occupation occurred around 10,400 years ago, he adds.http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com
If comparable dates of human occupation emerge for other Ushki camps, the standard account of Siberians initially entering Alaska about 11,000 years ago via a land bridge may get a boost. Artifacts found at the recently excavated Ushki site resemble those at Alaskan sites of about the same age, Goebel says.
The oldest Ushki material includes notched stone points and two hearths constructed of large stones. The younger artifacts include a hearth and miniature blades. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
However, new work doesn't support the idea that people lived at the Ushki camps well before that time. Radiocarbon dating of ancient charcoal found at an Ushki site excavated in 2000 by a joint team from Russia and the United States indicates that residents first arrived at the site between 11,300 and 11,000 years ago, says Ted Goebel of the University of Nevada, Reno. A subsequent occupation occurred around 10,400 years ago, he adds.http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com
If comparable dates of human occupation emerge for other Ushki camps, the standard account of Siberians initially entering Alaska about 11,000 years ago via a land bridge may get a boost. Artifacts found at the recently excavated Ushki site resemble those at Alaskan sites of about the same age, Goebel says.
The oldest Ushki material includes notched stone points and two hearths constructed of large stones. The younger artifacts include a hearth and miniature blades. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Monday, December 15, 2008
lesbian 2.les.00100 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The microscopic aquatic creatures known as bdelloid rotifers are used to enduring dry spells—in more senses than one. In their common habitats of moss, soil, and seasonal pools, these minuscule, transparent animals routinely survive periods of complete dessication that can last from days to years. They also hold the record for celibacy among animals: All 460 known species of bdelloids consist exclusively of egg-laying females that have essentially been cloning themselves for 100 million years. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com Their endurance has long posed a kind of scientific mystery, as the majority of asexually reproducing species tend to fade away over time. But a genetic study published in May in Science [subscription required] hints that bdelloids emerging from a drought might have a kind of bizarre sex after all. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com
For most life-forms, going for long periods without water spells certain doom. But dehydrated bdelloids somehow reconstitute themselves when moisture returns, even though their metabolic activity stops, their cell membranes rupture, and their DNA probably gets fragmented too. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com “You add water, they fix themselves up, and they swim away,” says lead investigator Matthew Meselson of Harvard University.
Meselson’s study suggests that upon patching up their own DNA, the bdelloids simultaneously incorporate random scraps of DNA from other organisms. This so-called horizontal gene transfer is extremely rare among animals, and in the bdelloids’ case can include DNA from almost anything that was in their soupy habitat at the time things dried up, including whatever they just ate. In only 1 percent of the bdelloid genome, Meselson found dozens of foreign genes from bacteria, plants, and fungi inserted among the native nucleotides. It’s likely, he says, that during recovery from dessication, bdelloids pick up genes from members of their own species, too—dead members, that is, whose genes spill out of ruptured cell membranes. That process would provide the kind of genetic reshuffling that other animals achieve through sexual reproduction.
“It may be their form of sex,” Meselson says. “But their partner is essentially dead. So you’d have to call it necrophilia. Actually, since they’re all females, lesbian necrophilia.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
For most life-forms, going for long periods without water spells certain doom. But dehydrated bdelloids somehow reconstitute themselves when moisture returns, even though their metabolic activity stops, their cell membranes rupture, and their DNA probably gets fragmented too. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.wordpress.com “You add water, they fix themselves up, and they swim away,” says lead investigator Matthew Meselson of Harvard University.
Meselson’s study suggests that upon patching up their own DNA, the bdelloids simultaneously incorporate random scraps of DNA from other organisms. This so-called horizontal gene transfer is extremely rare among animals, and in the bdelloids’ case can include DNA from almost anything that was in their soupy habitat at the time things dried up, including whatever they just ate. In only 1 percent of the bdelloid genome, Meselson found dozens of foreign genes from bacteria, plants, and fungi inserted among the native nucleotides. It’s likely, he says, that during recovery from dessication, bdelloids pick up genes from members of their own species, too—dead members, that is, whose genes spill out of ruptured cell membranes. That process would provide the kind of genetic reshuffling that other animals achieve through sexual reproduction.
“It may be their form of sex,” Meselson says. “But their partner is essentially dead. So you’d have to call it necrophilia. Actually, since they’re all females, lesbian necrophilia.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
study 00.stu.110020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Harvests of corn and other crops are likely to be drawn into a tug of war between people's need for food and their need for fuel, agricultural economists say.
Corn is the most cost-efficient and popular raw material used in the United States to make ethanol. That's important because the fuel has gotten increasingly competitive with gasoline as oil prices have risen.
"The lines between the food economy and the energy economy [are] becoming blurred," says agricultural economist Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Last week, his organization issued an economic analysis on the subject.
The analysis found an emerging "competition between the 800 million people who own automobiles and the 2 billion low-income people, many of whom already spend over half their income on food," Brown says. Furthermore, he says, "taxpayers may be subsidizing a rise in their own food prices."
To encourage the use of alternative fuels, U.S. law subsidizes ethanol production at 51 cents per gallon and production of other so-called biofuels at up to $1 per gallon. Those incentives tempt farmers to sell crops to biofuel distilleries or, if they instead sell to food manufacturers, to demand higher prices than they otherwise would.
One-fifth of corn and almost one sixth of the U.S. grain harvest overall goes toward ethanol production, according to the institute's report. And while the world's production of grain will grow by about 20 million tons this year, 70 percent of the increase could be used to generate ethanol for U.S. automobiles, Brown says.
Combustion vs. consumption
"Ethanol plants [are] being built, and they're starting to pull more corn their way," comments agricultural economist Chad E. Hart of Iowa State University in Ames. "We're seeing already higher projected prices than normal for the 2007 crop."
Predicting that the growth of the ethanol industry could drive up food prices as early as next year, Hart notes that corn futures are trading at about $3 per bushel, or about 50 cents higher than usual.
With demand for corn rising, production is also likely to increase, Hart says. Higher corn prices will lure farmers to devote more acres to cultivating corn and fewer to other crops. That, he says, will encourage "an across-the-board increase in crop prices"—as well as in the price of animal feed derived from such crops.
"If corn price goes up, you'll probably feel it more in the cost of your steak than the cost of your cornflakes," Hart says.
Processing, packaging, and distribution costs account for more than 90 percent of the commercial price of cornflakes, bread, and other grain-based products. "Most of the cost of [products such as] bread is not in the cost of the raw materials," Hart says.
By contrast, the cost of feed for animals and other expenses incurred on livestock farms account for about half of the commercial price of meat and eggs, and nearly a third of the cost of cheese. Therefore, Hart says, higher corn prices aren't likely to translate into penny-for-penny increases in food costs.
In addition, Hart says, byproducts of ethanol production from corn, such as corn-gluten meal, can be used to feed livestock. That way, not all the corn used to make fuel is diverted from the food supply.
"So the price impact on livestock products will likely be relatively small in comparison to the change in corn prices," he says.
A technological shift away from corn-based ethanol toward ethanol made from non-crop plants could eventually reverse the anticipated rise in crop costs, Hart says.
A scientific study published last week finds that making ethanol from corn generates less new energy than does manufacturing certain other kinds of biofuel, such as biodiesel made from soybeans (see Farm-Fuel Feedback: Soybeans have advantages over corn).
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But if ethanol remains the primary alternative fuel in the United States, a possible replacement for corn could be cellulose from other plants. A weedy plant called switchgrass, for instance, is a productive source of that material, and the plant can be grown in abundance on land unsuitable for crops.
Of a mostly switchgrass-based ethanol industry, Hart says: "While it's technically feasible, it's not commercially viable at this time. For the U.S., corn is the best model going right now." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Corn is the most cost-efficient and popular raw material used in the United States to make ethanol. That's important because the fuel has gotten increasingly competitive with gasoline as oil prices have risen.
"The lines between the food economy and the energy economy [are] becoming blurred," says agricultural economist Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Last week, his organization issued an economic analysis on the subject.
The analysis found an emerging "competition between the 800 million people who own automobiles and the 2 billion low-income people, many of whom already spend over half their income on food," Brown says. Furthermore, he says, "taxpayers may be subsidizing a rise in their own food prices."
To encourage the use of alternative fuels, U.S. law subsidizes ethanol production at 51 cents per gallon and production of other so-called biofuels at up to $1 per gallon. Those incentives tempt farmers to sell crops to biofuel distilleries or, if they instead sell to food manufacturers, to demand higher prices than they otherwise would.
One-fifth of corn and almost one sixth of the U.S. grain harvest overall goes toward ethanol production, according to the institute's report. And while the world's production of grain will grow by about 20 million tons this year, 70 percent of the increase could be used to generate ethanol for U.S. automobiles, Brown says.
Combustion vs. consumption
"Ethanol plants [are] being built, and they're starting to pull more corn their way," comments agricultural economist Chad E. Hart of Iowa State University in Ames. "We're seeing already higher projected prices than normal for the 2007 crop."
Predicting that the growth of the ethanol industry could drive up food prices as early as next year, Hart notes that corn futures are trading at about $3 per bushel, or about 50 cents higher than usual.
With demand for corn rising, production is also likely to increase, Hart says. Higher corn prices will lure farmers to devote more acres to cultivating corn and fewer to other crops. That, he says, will encourage "an across-the-board increase in crop prices"—as well as in the price of animal feed derived from such crops.
"If corn price goes up, you'll probably feel it more in the cost of your steak than the cost of your cornflakes," Hart says.
Processing, packaging, and distribution costs account for more than 90 percent of the commercial price of cornflakes, bread, and other grain-based products. "Most of the cost of [products such as] bread is not in the cost of the raw materials," Hart says.
By contrast, the cost of feed for animals and other expenses incurred on livestock farms account for about half of the commercial price of meat and eggs, and nearly a third of the cost of cheese. Therefore, Hart says, higher corn prices aren't likely to translate into penny-for-penny increases in food costs.
In addition, Hart says, byproducts of ethanol production from corn, such as corn-gluten meal, can be used to feed livestock. That way, not all the corn used to make fuel is diverted from the food supply.
"So the price impact on livestock products will likely be relatively small in comparison to the change in corn prices," he says.
A technological shift away from corn-based ethanol toward ethanol made from non-crop plants could eventually reverse the anticipated rise in crop costs, Hart says.
A scientific study published last week finds that making ethanol from corn generates less new energy than does manufacturing certain other kinds of biofuel, such as biodiesel made from soybeans (see Farm-Fuel Feedback: Soybeans have advantages over corn).
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But if ethanol remains the primary alternative fuel in the United States, a possible replacement for corn could be cellulose from other plants. A weedy plant called switchgrass, for instance, is a productive source of that material, and the plant can be grown in abundance on land unsuitable for crops.
Of a mostly switchgrass-based ethanol industry, Hart says: "While it's technically feasible, it's not commercially viable at this time. For the U.S., corn is the best model going right now." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Sunday, November 23, 2008
absorb 43.abs.02 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Residents of a Chinese region where 80 percent of families include workers who dismantle and recycle electronic devices have high concentrations of flame-retardant chemicals in their blood, researchers report. Inhabitants of a fishing village not far away also carried elevated amounts of the chemicals, called polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs).
Much of the world's electronic waste ends up in China, where most handlers of the materials work without protective gear. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US They smash the components and strip out metals, releasing dust laden with deca-BDE, a flame retardant commonly added to plastic components.
In this first study of PBDE occupational exposure in China, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou and Lancaster University in England analyzed blood samples from individuals at two sites in southern China. One group of people lived in Guiyu, an electronic-waste-dismantling area in southern China. People in a comparison group lived in Haojiang, a fishing village 50 kilometers away.
PBDEs come in 209 forms that include different arrangements of up to 10 bromine atoms. Studies in mice and rats have shown that PBDEs with 5 or 8 bromine atoms harm brain development (SN: 10/13/01, p. 238; SN: 10/25/03, p. 266). Growing evidence suggests that deca-BDE, which contains 10 bromine atoms, can cause the same developmental problems either on its own or when it breaks down into PBDEs with fewer bromines, says Linda Birnbaum, director of the Environmental Protection Agency's experimental toxicology division.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Deca-BDE is widely used in electronics and upholstery. The Guiyu residents had a median concentration of deca-BDE up to 200 times as high as were typically seen in two Swedish studies of industrial workers.
Total PBDE concentrations among individuals in Guiyu had a median value three times as high as did the individuals in Haojiang, the researchers report in the Aug. 15 Environmental Science & Technology. The elevated concentrations of PBDEs in villagers in Haojiang indicate that airborne dust particles might have carried the chemicals to the village, says Gareth Thomas of Lancaster University, a coauthor of the study. The highest deca-BDE contamination ever reported was recorded in a 32-year-old Guiyu man whose blood contained 3,100 parts per billion (ppb) lipid. Lipid molecules, or fat, accumulate these chemicals.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
The astronomical concentrations of deca-BDE, a median of 310 ppb lipid in Guiyu, indicate regular, heavy exposure to the chemical, comments Åke Bergman of Stockholm University. That's because deca-BDE has a half-life in the body of just 15 days. "In order to keep up these very high concentrations, the people need to be continuously exposed," he says.
The overall PBDE concentrations seen in the Guiyu residents are in "a risk region" for exposing a woman's fetus to amounts of the compounds that could damage a developing brain, Bergman adds.
He notes that electronic-waste recycling is done in other countries by workers who may be no better protected than the Guiyu workers are. "We may have a few more areas in the world where we have [elevated] exposure to humans and also to the environment," he says.
Much of the world's electronic waste ends up in China, where most handlers of the materials work without protective gear. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US They smash the components and strip out metals, releasing dust laden with deca-BDE, a flame retardant commonly added to plastic components.
In this first study of PBDE occupational exposure in China, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou and Lancaster University in England analyzed blood samples from individuals at two sites in southern China. One group of people lived in Guiyu, an electronic-waste-dismantling area in southern China. People in a comparison group lived in Haojiang, a fishing village 50 kilometers away.
PBDEs come in 209 forms that include different arrangements of up to 10 bromine atoms. Studies in mice and rats have shown that PBDEs with 5 or 8 bromine atoms harm brain development (SN: 10/13/01, p. 238; SN: 10/25/03, p. 266). Growing evidence suggests that deca-BDE, which contains 10 bromine atoms, can cause the same developmental problems either on its own or when it breaks down into PBDEs with fewer bromines, says Linda Birnbaum, director of the Environmental Protection Agency's experimental toxicology division.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Deca-BDE is widely used in electronics and upholstery. The Guiyu residents had a median concentration of deca-BDE up to 200 times as high as were typically seen in two Swedish studies of industrial workers.
Total PBDE concentrations among individuals in Guiyu had a median value three times as high as did the individuals in Haojiang, the researchers report in the Aug. 15 Environmental Science & Technology. The elevated concentrations of PBDEs in villagers in Haojiang indicate that airborne dust particles might have carried the chemicals to the village, says Gareth Thomas of Lancaster University, a coauthor of the study. The highest deca-BDE contamination ever reported was recorded in a 32-year-old Guiyu man whose blood contained 3,100 parts per billion (ppb) lipid. Lipid molecules, or fat, accumulate these chemicals.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
The astronomical concentrations of deca-BDE, a median of 310 ppb lipid in Guiyu, indicate regular, heavy exposure to the chemical, comments Åke Bergman of Stockholm University. That's because deca-BDE has a half-life in the body of just 15 days. "In order to keep up these very high concentrations, the people need to be continuously exposed," he says.
The overall PBDE concentrations seen in the Guiyu residents are in "a risk region" for exposing a woman's fetus to amounts of the compounds that could damage a developing brain, Bergman adds.
He notes that electronic-waste recycling is done in other countries by workers who may be no better protected than the Guiyu workers are. "We may have a few more areas in the world where we have [elevated] exposure to humans and also to the environment," he says.
Monday, November 17, 2008
10 steps 556.ste.000123 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Hieroglyphics carved into recently discovered stairs on the side of an ancient Maya pyramid recount a tale of betrayal and warfare spearheaded by two dominant city-states.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
A hurricane that hit the Guatemalan site of Dos Pilas last summer exposed a section of the staircase. Researchers led by Federico Fahsen of Vanderbilt University in Nashville excavated the area and deciphered inscriptions blanketing 10 newly uncovered steps. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz The finds, described in the October National Geographic, add to eight previously investigated steps in the same staircase that had been discovered nearby.
Writing on the new steps describes events from nearly 1,500 years ago, during the reign of a Dos Pilas king named Balaj Chan K'awiil. Inscriptions tell of his installation at age 4 by order of his older brother, who ruled the nearby kingdom of Tikal.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Balaj Chan K'awiil maintained good relations with Tikal until his early 20s, when hieroglyphics note that another Maya kingdom, Calakmul, conquered Dos Pilas.
Aligning himself with Calakmul, the young ruler then defeated Tikal in battle and executed his brother.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Researchers had known that Dos Pilas became a regional power around that time. The new information shows that the settlement was a pawn in a battle between Maya superpowers, says Fahsen. In contrast, some anthropologists regard Dos Pilas as having been one of many comparably powerful city-states.
Fahsen presents the first evidence for an attack on Dos Pilas by Calakmul, comments Harvard University's David Stuart, a specialist in Maya writing. However, other Dos Pilas hieroglyphics deciphered over the past decade had already outlined a fierce rivalry between Tikal and Calakmul, with Dos Pilas caught in the middle, Stuart says.
A hurricane that hit the Guatemalan site of Dos Pilas last summer exposed a section of the staircase. Researchers led by Federico Fahsen of Vanderbilt University in Nashville excavated the area and deciphered inscriptions blanketing 10 newly uncovered steps. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz The finds, described in the October National Geographic, add to eight previously investigated steps in the same staircase that had been discovered nearby.
Writing on the new steps describes events from nearly 1,500 years ago, during the reign of a Dos Pilas king named Balaj Chan K'awiil. Inscriptions tell of his installation at age 4 by order of his older brother, who ruled the nearby kingdom of Tikal.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Balaj Chan K'awiil maintained good relations with Tikal until his early 20s, when hieroglyphics note that another Maya kingdom, Calakmul, conquered Dos Pilas.
Aligning himself with Calakmul, the young ruler then defeated Tikal in battle and executed his brother.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Researchers had known that Dos Pilas became a regional power around that time. The new information shows that the settlement was a pawn in a battle between Maya superpowers, says Fahsen. In contrast, some anthropologists regard Dos Pilas as having been one of many comparably powerful city-states.
Fahsen presents the first evidence for an attack on Dos Pilas by Calakmul, comments Harvard University's David Stuart, a specialist in Maya writing. However, other Dos Pilas hieroglyphics deciphered over the past decade had already outlined a fierce rivalry between Tikal and Calakmul, with Dos Pilas caught in the middle, Stuart says.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
supreme 77773.sup.44 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision today ruled that the Navy does not have to consider the effect of sonar on whales when training with sonar off the coast of California. "The Court does not question the importance of plaintiffs' ecological, scientific and recreational interests, but it concludes that the balance of equities and consideration of the overall public interest tip strongly in favor of the Navy," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. "The determination of where the public interest lies in this case does not strike the Court as a close question." http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
Environmentalists, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued to stop the sonar exercises, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) charged that the high-intensity mid-frequency active (MFA) sonar blankets vast areas of the ocean with noise pollution, causing whales, including endangered beak whales, to beach and/or die. The Navy does not dispute the potential danger to the mammals, acknowledging in its own environmental assessments that the sonar may permanently damage as many as 500 whales and temporarily deafen at least 8,000 whales.
A lower court had imposed six injunctions on the Navy when using such sonar, including shutting it down when marine mammals are within 2,200 yards or when on the surface, a 12-mile no-sonar buffer zone off the coast of California and routine monitoring for marine mammals. NRDC senior attorney Joel Reynolds notes that the decision only obviates the need for the Navy to shut down such sonar but left in place the other protections. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
The Navy also reached an agreement in September 2007 with a host of environmental groups to confine even more damaging low-frequency active (LFA) sonar—which remain strong for at least 300 miles and can be detected across entire oceans—to certain regions of the North Pacific.
"It does not need to be an either/or scenario when it comes to ensuring our country is secure and our marine wildlife is protected," says IFAW lawyer Nathaniel Wechsler "Our military can protect endangered species and meet our nation's security needs at the same time." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Environmentalists, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued to stop the sonar exercises, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) charged that the high-intensity mid-frequency active (MFA) sonar blankets vast areas of the ocean with noise pollution, causing whales, including endangered beak whales, to beach and/or die. The Navy does not dispute the potential danger to the mammals, acknowledging in its own environmental assessments that the sonar may permanently damage as many as 500 whales and temporarily deafen at least 8,000 whales.
A lower court had imposed six injunctions on the Navy when using such sonar, including shutting it down when marine mammals are within 2,200 yards or when on the surface, a 12-mile no-sonar buffer zone off the coast of California and routine monitoring for marine mammals. NRDC senior attorney Joel Reynolds notes that the decision only obviates the need for the Navy to shut down such sonar but left in place the other protections. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
The Navy also reached an agreement in September 2007 with a host of environmental groups to confine even more damaging low-frequency active (LFA) sonar—which remain strong for at least 300 miles and can be detected across entire oceans—to certain regions of the North Pacific.
"It does not need to be an either/or scenario when it comes to ensuring our country is secure and our marine wildlife is protected," says IFAW lawyer Nathaniel Wechsler "Our military can protect endangered species and meet our nation's security needs at the same time." Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Thursday, September 25, 2008
हद ००३३९९ लुईस
Trying to keep up with the blogs at ScienceBlogs is like trying to dig a hole in water, they have so many. But still I was surprised that I didn’t know about Science Woman. They just posted a very cool link of their blogroll which contains a zillion links to science/tech/engineering/math (STEM) blogs written by women.http://louis-j-sheehan.com
It’s pretty good, but I noticed they are missing a few, so I sent them a comment about it (awaiting moderation as I write this). Here are the ones I read (or listen to):
- Pamela Gay’s Star Stryder and AstronomyCast
- Amanda Bauer’s AstroPixie
- Damaris B Sarria’s How I Am Becoming An Astronaut (actually I forgot to add Ms. Sarria’s blog, but it’s here now!)
- Carolyn Porco’s CICLOPS site (not strictly a blog, but c’mon).
- My old friend Carolyn Collins Peterson’s The Spacewriter
- Skepchick
- Teen Skepchick
- There’s also the new vodcast from Australia, The Skeptic Zone, which features Karen Stollznow, Kylie Sturgess, Amanda Rose, and Rachael Dunlap.
I bet I’ve missed some. If you know of more, send them to Science Woman! And let me know, too, because I have sooo much spare time to read more stuff added to my feed reader. 
Tip o’ the lab coat to ScienceGeekGirl.
Trans-cosmic flow broadens our horizon
In one of the weirder astronomy press releases I’ve seen in a while, it appears that material literally outside the visible Universe is tugging on material that we can see.
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| Hubble image of the Bullet Cluster, which appears to be getting yanked by material from The Other Side. Click to embiggen. |
What does this mean? First off, let’s take a sec and talk about the visible Universe. If you go outside and look around, you don’t see the whole Earth. You only see a small fraction of its surface, because the Earth is a curved ball. The solid planet itself blocks your view. The farthest you can see is out to the horizon, where the curving Earth dips everything else below your view (well, except for tall objects like buildings and ships at sea, but we can ignore them for this analogy).
The Universe is the same way. The fabric of space is expanding, with the cosmos getting bigger every day. This has an odd effect: objects farther away appear to be moving more rapidly away from us. Eventually, an object can be so far away that the space between us is effectively expanding faster than the speed of light! This does’t violate any physical laws, because nothing material is actually moving at transluminal speeds; it’s just that there is more space itself between us and that object all the time.
This effect naturally provides us with a cosmic horizon. Any object "moving away" from us faster than light can’t be seen by us; the photons it emits can’t keep up with the expansion of space. They lose energy and fall away from view (like a slow walker on a fast treadmill… or better yet, an ant walking along a rubber band that is being stretched). So, to us, an object far enough away is invisible, beyond the Universal horizon.
Weird, huh? Yeah, as usual, things get even weirder.
Now imagine a third object, say a cluster of galaxies, that lies between us and the one that is beyond our horizon. To the cluster, the object may still be visible, because it’s closer, and therefore not receding as rapidly. It’s like an island just over the horizon to you as you look seaward from the beach; to you the island is invisible, but to someone a few kilometers out to sea in a yacht the island is still visible.
That cluster can still be affected by the more distant object, pulled by its gravity, for example. To us, farther away, we don’t see that distant object, but to the cluster it’s sitting right there and still, literally, a force with which to be reckoned.
If you want to go away for a moment and take some Tylenol, I understand. I feel a bit headachy myself just writing this.
The thing is, astronomers now think they’ve detected this force! Clusters of galaxies are filled with extremely hot gas, or plasma, heated by things like the galaxies’ motion in the cluster. As light from objects farther away passes through this gas, it gets affected by it, and we can measure that change. This is called the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, and it’s too weak to measure well in individual clusters, but by looking at literally hundreds of clusters, the effect adds up and can be seen. [Edited to add: the photons that are being affected are not from the matter beyond the horizon, but from the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from a very early time in the Universe, but still in our visible Universe. Sorry I wasn’t clear about that in the original post.]
The total force is fairly big, in fact. Clusters seen in the direction of the constellations Centaurus and Vela appear to have an additional 3 million kilometers per hour added to their usual velocity! That means that some very large clump of matter — probably a cluster of galaxy clusters, called a supercluster — lies in that direction, over the horizon to us but very much visible to clusters we can see.
Imagine! It’s a sobering reminder that the Universe itself is literally bigger than we can see, with the majority of it forever beyond our ken.
And if your quota of weird isn’t yet sated, then ponder this: the expansion is accelerating. That means that objects we can see today, so distant they linger on our current horizon, will eventually fall away from view as the accelerating expansion beats out the velocity of the light they emit. They will literally move beyond the horizon and become invisible. In a sense, it’s as if the visible Universe is shrinking, the horizon getting closer to us every day. The physical Universe is getting bigger, but almost paradoxically what we see of it gets smaller. Someday, billions of years from now, only the closest of objects will remain visible.
Everything else will have sailed below the horizon. So we better take a look around while we still can.
[Incidentally, I cover this topic in more detail in my book Death from the Skies!, coming out in October, but already available for pre-order.]
People unclear on the concept
I get email. Because my site has been around a while it rises pretty high in Google searches, and that means all kinds of spam gets sent to me. Invalid offers to buy the site, requests for links, and such.
I just got this email, with the subject line "Link Exchange Request with Free Psychic Readings site":
Hi,
I saw your website’s page and felt that you have a wonderful resource which can be of interest to users on my website who are looking for free psychic readings. We will reciprocate you from one of our good theme based site.
My desired link is
[link redacted] Free Psychic Readings: 5Free Minutes @ [website name redacted] Get Live phone love relationship advice with Free Psychic Readings, Free Tarot Card Readings, Astrology Predictions, Numerology Readings and more on [website name redacted]!
I hope you will find my website another good resource to be added into your website.
Kindly revert back with your preferred linking code, hoping for a positive response from you.
Hmmm, a positive response? Well, I can positively say no.
Maybe these folks ought to actually, y’know, read my site first.
Shorter creationism
… Imagine how foolish you would feel if a thousand car mechanics tell you that you need to change the carburetor in your car and you keep insisting that they don’t know what they are talking about, elitist auto-experts that they are, because carburetors obviously don’t exist!
I am elitist. That is all.
News: Hubble Shuttle launch delayed to October 14
I just received word that the launch of Atlantis to service Hubble has been delayed from October 10 to October 14. The nominal launch time will be 10:19 p.m. Eastern (US) time. The launch was delayed so that NASA could check out all the facilities after Hurricane Ike.
This also means that the launch of Endeavour has been delayed to November 16.
For more info, check out NASA’s Shuttle pages.
The Mentalist: review
Last night was the premier of the TV "The Mentalist", what promised to be a skeptical look at psychics and police work.
Quick summary: it rocked.
More thorough summary:
"The Mentalist" is a different kind of crime drama. Baker is very engaging (especially, evidently, for my wife), and he does have a quality about him that makes him fun to watch. His character invokes sympathy right away, even if he is a bit of a pain in the butt. He’s confident, even a little arrogant, but funny and endearing. It’s hard not to compare him to the titular character from "House", though he’s not as grumpy.
I love love love his character. He hates so-called "psychics" — hates them. In one scene, he comes right out and says there are no such things as psychics! When he did that, Mrs BA, The Little Astronomer, and I all threw our arms over our heads, fists pumping the air! W00t!
But to the meat of this: I think a real skeptic is behind this show, someone who knows about the frauds, fakes, and evil people who claim to speak to the dead. Here’s why:
S P O I L E R S B E L O W
In a series of flashbacks, we see Patrick Jane as he was five years before, a stage psychic who uses all the fraudulent tricks to make people think he can speak to the dead. On a TV show, he also brags that he’s helping the police find a serial killer nicknamed Red John (most psychics make claims like these, but you will never, ever find a case that was solved by a psychic, or even aided by one). Jane brags about his abilities, and insults the serial killer, calling him ugly and small.
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| Red John’s signature |
When Jane comes home that night, there is a note on his bedroom door… from Red John. The killer wasn’t happy about being insulted in the media by Jane, and so has exacted his revenge. The note says that when Jane opens the door to the bedroom, he’ll find his wife and daughter, dead. In an unusual demonstration of restraint by a TV show, the scene ends showing him opening the door, and we don’t see the bodies. Just a lurid smiley face on the wall, drawn in blood, Red John’s signature.
Obviously, this is when Jane dropped the psychic act and became a vigilante against psychics. It’s also where he joins the police force.
During the show, Jane talks to a psychiatrist because he can’t sleep well at night. When asked why not, he makes up a story about a childhood tragedy. We, the viewers, know the real reason: guilt over the death of his family. His own hubris killed them.
Now let me make an aside. The real tragedy of these blood-sucking "psychics" who "talk to the dead" is that they interrupt the grieving process. If you lose someone you love, it’s awful, terrible, and the pain is tremendous. But, over time, you heal. It takes a long time, and of course you never totally get over it, but eventually you can heal, you can move on. "Psychics" stop this process cold.
By making people believe that their loved ones are still around, still issuing pablum-like things ("I’m happy", "I forgive you"), they don’t let the grieving people heal. They are picking at the wound, keeping it open. Sure, people may feel better in the short term, but the healing process is short-circuited, and that’s very unhealthy. And it’s another in a long list of reasons why people who claim to talk to the dead are so truly evil.
And that brings us to the last scene in "The Mentalist". At the end, after solving the case using his amazing observational skills, Jane goes home. We see it’s the same house he lived in when his wife and daughter were killed five years earlier… but it’s totally empty. All the furniture, all the furnishings are gone.
Jane slowly goes up the stairs and into the bedroom. Like the rest of the house, it’s stripped clean. The only thing in it is a bare mattress on the floor. Jane lies down on it, and the camera pans around, showing the bloody smiley face still on the wall.
I was astonished by this. The character of Patrick Jane feels tremendous guilt — as well he should — over the death of his family. Because of this, he punishes himself by staying in the same house, removing all the trappings of a happy life, and by leaving Red John’s mark on the wall.
But remember, he couldn’t tell the doctor why he wasn’t sleeping. He couldn’t admit to being partly responsible for his family’s death. He was a psychic, and he interrupted his own grieving process.
Beautiful. The writing here was intelligent, thoughtful, and because of this irony based on skeptical knowledge of "psychics", right on the mark.
And, in my opinion — as you might guess — nailed how truly loathsome "psychics" are.
This was one of the most skeptical shows I have ever seen on mainstream TV, and I hope they can keep this up. It showed so many tricks, so many insights into how to defraud people that I would LOVE it if more people watched and absorbed this knowledge. My only fear is that, under pressure from TV suits, they somehow let Jane get over his guilt and forgive the "psychics" — after all, his skepticism is in some ways due to his major character flaw, so it’s not a big jump for the writers to do that. So many shows cop out that way; make the skeptics look like jerks, and make the antiscience followers look sympathetic, when in fact that is far, far from the truth. So many "psychics" are the ones who use people, defraud people, and use their emotional vampirism to get rich, rich, rich.
So I can’t say enough good things about "The Mentalist". It was well acted, well written, and the staging and direction were very good. Overall it was engaging, funny, and drew me right in.
But I think the most important part is that it spoke from a true skeptical standpoint. Jane gave many of the arguments I hear from other skeptics about many antiscience topics, and they come from the star of a mainstream show. And to see a skeptic who is portrayed as sympathetic, attractive, and even likable was a breath of fresh air from a medium — heh, medium — that falls all over itself to give the phonies, the frauds, and the fakes far more than their fair share.
I hope "The Mentalist" has a long, skeptical, and critically acclaimed run.
Space X to try again this week
The private company Space X will try once again to get a Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. This fourth launch attempt could be as early as September 28!
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| The static firing engine test for the Falcon 1. |
They just had a "static firing" a test of the engines with the rocket strapped down। Everything looked pretty good, but they detected a minor fault in the second stage liquid oxygen supply. They’ll be replacing a component in that system just to be safe. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Friday, September 19, 2008
dust
Each morning I wake and open my eyes to a new day filled with things I can’t see. I’ve even grown to appreciate how much the unseen makes its presence felt throughout our daily lives. It has been this way since the dawn of time, but modern science has opened the doors to understanding the unseen worlds that crowd into our own and even allows us to manipulate some of them for our own ends. An endless silent babble of radio waves, massed armies of insects, long-gone planet-girdling ice sheets, endemic microbes, rivers of wind, and more all leave their stamp on the shape of my life in the course of 24 hours. Determined, I set off to unravel the mystery of my invisible day.
The Demons Within
8 a.m. I could pretend that I shoot out of bed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready for another day at DISCOVER. But the truth is much blearier, an important part of which is the eradication of the first invisible presence of the day: morning breath. My mouth feels less than fresh as I yawn my way to the bathroom.
Morning breath comes mostly from bacteria that live in the mouth. More than 500 types of oral bacteria have been identified in people so far, and “we keep on identifying more,” says Patricia Lenton, an oral malodor researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry and a “calibrated breath odor judge.” While we are sleeping, the flow of saliva in our mouths decreases, leaving the bacteria alone “back there, just producing things, lots of sulfur gases,” Lenton says. These orally produced sulfur gases—with names like hydrogen sulfide, methylmercaptan, and dimethyl sulfide—plus some other miscellaneous by-products of bacterial metabolism, account for 90 percent of bad breath that can’t be traced to an outside cause. Meanwhile, foods such as garlic and onions release sulfur compounds as they are digested in our intestines. Some of these compounds are absorbed into the bloodstream and pass into the air in our lungs. As we exhale, we breathe them out.
It’s also through the lungs that changes in blood chemistry caused by disease can affect the odor of our breath. “Diabetes is a good example. When people have uncontrolled diabetes, they can have a really sweet, fruity smell in their breath,” Lenton says. Researchers are even working to develop tests for breast cancer and organ transplant rejection based on the bouquet of a patient’s breath.
Most odor-producing bacteria live on the tongue, not the teeth, so I give my tongue a few good scrubs with my toothbrush before continuing my morning routine.
Scrutinizing the Jet Stream
9 a.m. I’m ready to leave, checking out the window for the effects of that all-time-classic invisible entity, the wind. I’m not looking for the effects of just any old gust of air. The specific wind that is going to determine whether I’ll have to put on a jacket is one that weather watchers didn’t even know existed a century ago.
It’s called the polar jet stream, and as it writhes eastward across the North American continent, it can bring storms in its wake or herald an unseasonable change in temperature—north of the jet stream lies cold, Arctic air, while to its south are warmer conditions। In summer months the polar jet stream flows mostly across Canada. During the winter it dips as far south as the U.S. Gulf states. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Jet streams occur at very high altitudes—30,000 to 40,000 feet—which is why they were not definitively identified until World War II, when pilots noticed intense headwinds during long-distance military missions. The heart of a jet stream is a relatively narrow band of strong wind a few hundred miles wide that can reach speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. Jet streams draw their energy from the rotation of the earth and the difference in temperature between the equator and higher latitudes. Without jet streams, “it would be a pretty boring place,” weatherwise, says Klaus Weickmann, a meteorologist at the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado.
Small changes in the jet stream as it passes overhead can create stormy weather at low altitudes. For example, “if you have a low-pressure area aloft, then you will tend to produce low pressure at the surface ahead of it,” Weickmann explains. “That particular [atmospheric] structure is very efficient at extracting available potential energy and converting it into kinetic energy.” This kinetic energy manifests itself in the kind of high winds and rains that can turn a day into a washout. From what I can see out my window though, the weather appears to be pretty calm, so I decide to leave my jacket at home and gather my things. I open my building’s front door and look up at the slight hill I have to climb to my subway stop.
Glacial Moment
It’s not much of a slope, but this hill, and others like it, are evidence of the ancient forces that ultimately brought me and more than 8 million other people to live in New York City. At the peak of the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, right outside my front door was a frozen glacier wall that rose as high as 300 feet, the southern edge of a vast ice sheet that covered Canada and the northern part of the United States. “Glaciers act as a plow, pushing stuff ahead,” says Sidney Horenstein, a geologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The edge of America’s ice sheet—marked by a line of rubble called the terminal moraine—ran along Long Island. When the earth warmed and the glacier receded, the rubble was left behind as a series of low hills. Look at a map of New York City and in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens (located on the west end of Long Island) you can see that chilly history encoded in the names of today’s neighborhoods: Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Forest Hills. Southeast of where I live, water from the melting edge of the glacier flowed over the landscape, depositing layers of sand and silt and leaving behind areas with names such as Flatbush and Flatlands. “The community names have meaning,” Horenstein says.
But the biggest impact on New York’s destiny came from the glaciers’ ability to erode, not build, landforms. A glacier “acts as sandpaper because it has rocks embedded in its base…so as the glacier moves, it’s deepening valleys and smoothing off the tops of hills,” Horenstein says. As the glacier moved south toward the future location of New York City, it widened and deepened the Hudson River valley. “The Hudson is the southernmost fjord in North America,” Horenstein says. When the first Europeans explored the river in 1609, they found in it an ideal trade route that penetrated into the continent. The glacier’s deepening of the Hudson also made New York Harbor a snap for trans-Atlantic shipping to navigate.
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These geologic advantages—a terrific natural harbor and an easy transportation route into the interior—allowed an active trading outpost to be established on Manhattan Island by 1625. Over the next four centuries, this blossomed into the international financial and cultural powerhouse that is New York City today—one that still draws people from all over the world to settle here.
Magnetic Attraction
There’s a lot of worry about what we might be breathing while commuting, so I borrowed an air sampling pump to find out.
It’s only a few minutes’ walk up the hill to the subway, and I descend the steps and enter the realm of magnetism. Magnetism is what gets 5.4 million passengers around New York City’s subway system every day, starting with the MetroCard I swipe at the turnstile to enter the system. My MetroCard has a stripe made from a slurry of barium ferrite particles painted onto the card. The stripe encodes a couple hundred bytes of data in magnetized patterns. The data are read by the subway turnstile, which decides whether I have paid for the trip. The turnstile also keeps a record of the card’s unique identification number and the time and date the card was used, regularly uploading this information to the New York City Transit Authority’s central computers. (The local police have found this inconspicuous record-keeping handy in implicating or exonerating suspects in criminal cases and have even used it to trace notorious fugitives such as Peter Braunstein, who sexually assaulted a woman after pretending to be a fireman checking for smoke damage in her building, according to newspaper accounts.)
But where magnetism really reigns supreme is in the motors that drive the subway trains. The New York City subway system supplies power to its trains via a third rail charged with about 625 volts of direct electric current (DC). A device called an inverter turns this into alternating current (AC), which is fed to the motors underneath each car. Inside the motor, the AC electricity flows through coils that surround the rotating core of the motor. The alternating current creates a constantly changing magnetic field and, through some clever engineering, magnetizes the core of the motor as well. Magnetic attraction pulls the rotor toward one coil and then to the next. The changing magnetic field ensures that the rotor will never come to rest, and its strength—thousands of times more powerful than a typical refrigerator magnet—provides the necessary push to keep the train moving.
Iron Lungs
Driven by its motors, my train rumbles into the station, clattering along the tracks. It’s about a 35-minute commute to my stop at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, and from there a five-minute walk to DISCOVER’s offices. There’s often a lot of worry in New York City about what we might be breathing into our lungs while we’re commuting and otherwise out and about. As is common around the country, New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation routinely monitors the levels of ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates in the air. Together these measurements give a pretty good snapshot of the health of the air, known as the Air Quality Index (AQI). Anyone can get a real-time report on the AQI in his or her area by visiting airnow.gov. But I was interested in finding out what else I might be breathing, so I borrowed an air sampling pump from Jennifer Richmond-Bryant, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at Hunter College in New York City.
Fortunately for me, I’m in no danger of metal poisoning—nearly all the elements we tested for, including lead, arsenic, and chromium, weren’t present at detectable levels. But two were detectable—iron and calcium. The iron comes from my time in the subway, generated from “wear and tear on the wheels and on the tracks,” which produces tiny iron particles in the air, Richmond-Bryant explains. The calcium comes from aboveground: There is “a decent amount of calcium in concrete,” she says. The concrete gets ground up “when people drive over it or when construction is going on,” and small amounts of it are released into the air. But New Yorkers needn’t worry—iron and calcium are not considered hazardous air pollutants by the EPA.
Radio Free New York
As I stroll along 14th Street to work, I’m also wandering through an invisible electromagnetic bedlam. Indeed, if I could see radio waves, the top of the Empire State Building 20 blocks north of me would be lit like a kaleidoscopic flare, illuminating the entire city. The Empire State Building is host to an array of antennas that are taking advantage of the building’s 1,454-foot height—to the top of its lightning rod—to broadcast a bevy of radio and television stations.
But it’s not just radio and TV signals that are in the air. Cell phones, Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, walkie-talkies, and more are all adding to the bedlam. To prevent transmissions from interfering with each other, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration tightly regulate the use of every radio frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. With a device known as a spectrum analyzer, it’s possible to visualize just how the spectrum is being used. I borrowed one that could detect signals from 100 kilohertz (kHz), just below the frequency of long-wave radio stations, up to 3 gigahertz (GHz), somewhat above the 2.4 GHz portion of the spectrum used by Wi-Fi connections (see “Radio Ways,” below). If you have a Wi-Fi-enabled computer, you can create your own poor-man’s version of a spectrum analyzer. You’ll need a piece of software like Kismet or KisMAC, which you can find free online. This software taps into your Wi-Fi card’s radio and displays all the signals from nearby Wi-Fi base stations, along with the frequency, or channel, that they are broadcasting on. This can come in handy if you’ve noticed a slowdown in your wireless connection speed—it might be that neighbors have set up a new Wi-Fi base station that is using the same channel as yours, resulting in interference. If you spot an unused channel with Kismet or KisMAC, you might want to adjust your base station so that you are connecting without interference.
It’s not just radio and TV signals. Cell phones, Wi-Fi laptops, walkie-talkies, and more are adding to the bedlam.
Software Shock
Once I finally reach DISCOVER’s office, around 10 a.m., the first thing I do (after fixing myself a cup of tea) is fire up my computer and check my e-mail accounts. The difference between a computer that is useful and one that is an expensive paperweight is, of course, software. A piece of software is essentially a list of instructions that tell a computer what to do. And these days, computers, along with their software, are everywhere.
If you’ve ever struggled to understand how a piece of software works, you are not alone. In fact, simply checking for new e-mail triggers a cascade of activity so complex that no human being could ever completely understand all of it. Subsystem interacts with subsystem as electrons surge and flow through microchips that operate according to the dictates of semiconductor physics. How is it, then, that every time you log on to the Internet, there’s a cool new Web site that seems to work just fine, despite not being programmed by a crack squad of Nobel laureates?
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The key to making it all work is the concept of layers. The top layer is the application that you’re using at the moment—a word processing application like Microsoft Word, say. The word processing application talks to your operating system, like Vista, a lower layer that handles requests to do things like save a file. In turn, the operating system talks to the hardware, such as your central processing unit, which has the responsibility for actually storing the file. And each one of those layers is composed of many sublayers. “It’s layer upon layer upon layer.…To me, the most marvelous thing about it is that all this stuff is transparent,” says Warren Harrison, a professor of computer science at Portland State University in Oregon. What Harrison means by “transparent” is that each layer makes the messy details of what it’s doing invisible to higher levels. This approach means that your word processor can just say “save this file” without worrying about the low-level details of how to organize the bits on your computer’s hard disk. Transparency also “gives us division of labor. So I can specialize in writing network software, and I don’t have to worry about knowing how to write a good user interface. Or, conversely, I can specialize in writing user interfaces and I don’t have to worry about network software,” Harrison says.
I obtained a measure of bacterial activity from a swab taken at a water fountain near our offices.
This principle of transparency extends to the Internet. Whenever I check the online weather report or my Facebook profile, the request passes from computer to computer until it reaches its destination. Yet as I sit at my computer, all these computers hide their presence as best they can, so it looks as if I have a direct computer-to-computer connection with the Web site of my choice.
Rocky Foundations
1 p.m. Lunchtime. I go out to grab something at a gyro stand down the street. I’m surrounded by buildings that are rather on the short side for Manhattan, rising only 10 or 11 stories. North of 33rd Street and at Manhattan’s southern tip, buildings that are over 40 stories high are common, giving the city’s skyline a saddlebacked appearance, as building heights drop sharply between the two clusters of towers. Another quirk of geology is to blame. The city’s bedrock, formed through a cataclysmic series of tectonic collisions 550 million years ago, rises close to, or even pushes through, the surface in some parts of the city, creating the perfect foundation for very tall buildings. In other parts—such as near 14th Street, where I am standing, waiting for my lunch—the bedrock is covered by up to several hundred feet of dirt and gravel. This looser material can’t support as much weight as the bedrock, resulting in more squat buildings.
The Microbial Manifest
Lunch in hand, I return to the office. The rest of the day is spent in meetings and working at my computer. Six o’clock rolls around and I descend again into the subway. The train is usually pretty crowded, so I often have to stand and hold on to a metal railing for the trip. It’s when the railing is still warm and slightly greasy from an earlier passenger’s hand that my thoughts turn to the subway’s microbial population. Vincent LaBombardi, director of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, is reassuring, though: “Most organisms that you find are not pathogenic; they’re typical environmental bugs that you would not be terribly surprised to find, like corynebacterium species and bacillus species.” LaBombardi does note that also to be found is “the cold virus and other types of the adenovirus and whatnot—but that is no different from anyplace else.”
Just to make sure, I swabbed a subway car handrail and had it checked for two bugs that are often in the news lately, E. coli and staph bacteria, as well as for a general measure of bacterial activity, known as the standard plate count, or SPC. The E. coli and staph test came back negative, and the rail’s SPC count of 480 compared favorably with the SPC of 200,000 that was obtained from a swab taken at a water fountain in a park near DISCOVER’s offices.
On the less reassuring side, LaBombardi says that in New York City tropical diseases are common: “We have a lot of people who travel, and they bring back souvenirs. So we see malaria; we see many parasitic infections.” But his big worry is drug-resistant bacteria. New York has “more strains that are resistant to antibiotics” than do other parts of the United States. For “some of these bugs [such as enterococcus] we have no drugs left,” he says. “They’re totally resistant to everything now.” Hand-sanitizing gels do not get rid of spores such as those belonging to Clostridium difficile, “a big pathogen” that can cause diarrhea and inflammation of the colon. But old-fashioned hygiene makes a good defense—LaBombardi recommends simply washing hands regularly with soap and water.
Picture Platters
Once home, therefore, I make sure to wash my hands before fixing dinner. My wife, Annie, and I settle down to watch a DVD. DVDs—like CDs before them and the Blu-ray discs that will eventually replace them—are a form of optical media. Beneath the plastic surface of the DVD, tiny pits and level spots called lands are arranged in a spiral with a 0.74-micron pitch about the size of an average bacterium. These tiny pits and lands encode digital zeros and ones. The DVD player spins the disc, and as it rotates, the spiral is scanned by a laser beam, which acts much like the needle in an old record player. The laser light used in DVD players operates at a wavelength of 650 nanometers (nm), which means it has a visible red color. Blu-ray discs squeeze more information onto the same size disc as a DVD—up to 50 gigabytes on a typical disc, compared with about 8 gigabytes for many movie DVDs—by using a data spiral with a pitch of just 0.32 micron and a 405-nm laser beam. Although 405 nm corresponds to a violet color, it is referred to as blue—hence the name of the format.
The Arthropod Army
Soon enough it’s midnight and time for my eight hours of shut-eye. I climb into bed, not thinking of the extensive colony of tiny arthropods lurking in my pillow and mattress. These arthropods are dust mites, and unless you’ve taken exceptional measures, they’re in your pillow and mattress too. Dust mites “need places to hide, and they like places with higher humidity,” says Jason Rasgon, an assistant professor of microbiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health। “They’ll definitely be in mattresses and pillows; they’ll be in the carpets. They can be pretty much everywhere.” Dust mites feed on organic detritus: “Household dust is made up of dirt and shed skin cells, and they like that kind of stuff,” Rasgon says. Male dust mites live for about a month. The females live about twice that and lay about 30 eggs in their lifetime. Both sexes are less than 420 microns long and look like specks of dirt to the naked eye. There can be as many as 19,000 dust mites in three-hundredths of an ounce of dust (but a few hundred is more likely). http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Dust mites are a subject of increasing health concern because they can be highly allergenic. According to Rasgon, people can react not only to the mites themselves but also to their exoskeletons, which are shed as the mites molt during their life cycles. And then there’s frass, which, Rasgon helpfully explains, is “mite poop.” Dust mite allergens can trigger serious asthma attacks and other allergic reactions. Some severe sufferers have to cover their mattresses and pillows with impermeable material.
For me, though, it’s head down and off into the realm of sleep. Exactly what happens inside our skulls when we are dreaming is still an area of active debate, but my nighttime visions are anything but invisible to me as I slumber, resting and gathering my forces for another day.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
Try not to think about a white bear and suddenly there it is, haunting your thoughts. A new study indicates that attempting to suppress specific thoughts also has a delayed effect by bringing them out in dreams.http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
The findings elaborate on Sigmund Freud's century-old idea that wishes suppressed during the day find expression in dreams, says Harvard University psychologist Daniel M. Wegner. Now, it appears that consciously squelched thoughts often reappear in dreams, whether or not those thoughts incorporate wishes, he says.
Wegner and his coworkers studied the dreams of 295 college students. Before going to sleep at home volunteers spent 5 minutes writing down their thoughts. The participants had been given one of the following instructions: Don't think about a specific person whom you either regard as a friend or have a crush on, do think about that person, or simply write his or her initials.
Each type of exercise before sleep prompted many volunteers to report, upon waking in the morning, that they had dreamed about the person they had thought about or tried not to think about the night before, the researchers say in the April Psychological Science. About one-third of those who tried not to think about the designated person then dreamed about him or her, compared with only one-quarter or so of those in the groups encouraged to think about that person or asked to write initials.http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
Wegner says that the findings have no bearing on Freud's controversial notion that unconsciously repressed thoughts, like consciously suppressed ones, reappear in dreams.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
CASE
A new analysis by anthropologists of the 1.8-million-year-old skullcap of a Homo erectus child, discovered on the Indonesian island of Java in 1936, indicates that the youngster's brain grew relatively quickly, much as the brains of modern chimpanzees do.http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.us
The prehistoric child died at around age 1 but already possessed a brain case that was at least three-quarters the size of that for an average adult H. erectus, report Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues. In contrast, a modern person's brain reaches only about one-half of its adult size by age 1.Louis J. Sheehan
This disparity in the timing of brain growth "makes it unlikely that early Homo had cognitive skills comparable to those of modern humans," such as speaking grammatically complex languages, the scientists conclude in the Sept. 16 Nature.http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.us
Hublin's group used computed tomography scans to assess signs of bone maturation in the fossil, known as the Mojokerto child, and in modern skulls from 159 children and 201 young chimpanzees.
Prior analyses of the Mojokerto child had assigned it an age at death ranging from 1।5 to 8 years, solely on the basis of comparisons to modern human skulls.Louis J. Sheehan
Saturday, August 23, 2008
oxytocin
Some people smell fear in potential business partners. Others smell a rat. But individuals who smell a certain brain hormone become unusually trusting of others in financial transactions, according to a new report.
Men who inhale a nasal spray spiked with oxytocin give more money to partners in a risky investment game than do men who sniff a spray containing no active ingredient, say economist Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and his colleagues.
Previous studies of nonhuman animals had suggested that oxytocin in the brain encourages long-term mating in pairs of adults and nurturing behaviors by mothers toward their offspring। This substance, which works as both a hormone and a neurotransmitter, fosters the trust needed for friendship, love, families, economic transactions, and political networks, Fehr proposes. Louis J. Sheehan
"Oxytocin specifically affects an individual's willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions," he and his colleagues conclude in the June 2 Nature.
The scientists studied oxytocin's influence on male college students playing an investment game. Each of 58 men was paid $64 to participate in the experiment.
The volunteers were paired up, and one man in each pair was randomly assigned to play the role of an investor and the other to play the role of a trustee. Each participant received 12 tokens, valued at 32 cents each and redeemable at the end of the experiment.
The investor in each pair decided how many tokens to cede to the trustee। Both participants, sitting face to face, knew that the experimenters would quadruple that investment. The trustee then determined whether to keep the entire, enhanced pot or give some portion of the proceeds—whatever amount seemed fair—to the investor. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Among the investors who had inhaled oxytocin, about half gave all their tokens to trustees, and most of the rest contributed a majority of their tokens. In contrast, only one-fifth of investors who had inhaled a placebo spray forked over all their tokens, and another one-third parted with a majority of their tokens.
Oxytocin influenced only investors। Trustees returned comparable amounts of money after inhaling either spray. The trustee responses were generous when the investors offered most of their tokens and were stingy when the investment was small, Fehr and his coworkers report. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
The influence of oxytocin was limited to social situations. In another part of the study, oxytocin didn't affect isolated investors who received randomly assigned amounts of money after making their contributions.
The oxytocin influence is "a remarkable finding," says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa College of Medicine in Iowa City in an editorial published with the new report. Damasio had previously argued that the hormone acts somewhat as a love potion. "It adds trust to the mix, for there is no love without trust," he says.
Worries may arise that crowds of people will be sprayed with oxytocin at political rallies or other events to induce trust in speakers, Damasio notes. However, he proposes that slick marketing strategies for political and other products probably already trigger oxytocin release in many consumers.
Fehr's group plans to determine what brain networks participate in oxytocin-inspired trust decisions and to consider whether oxytocin might counter social phobia and other mental disorders that result in social avoidance.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Wallerstein
Commentary No. 239, Aug. 15, 2009
"Geopolitical Chess: Background to a Mini-war in the Caucasus"
The world has been witness this month to a mini-war in the Caucasus, and the rhetoric has been passionate, if largely irrelevant. Geopolitics is a gigantic series of two-player chess games, in which the players seek positional advantage. In these games, it is crucial to know the current rules that govern the moves. Knights are not allowed to move diagonally.
From 1945 to 1989, the principal chess game was that between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was called the Cold War, and the basic rules were called metaphorically "Yalta." The most important rule concerned a line that divided Europe into two zones of influence. It was called by Winston Churchill the "Iron Curtain" and ran from Stettin to Trieste. The rule was that, no matter how much turmoil was instigated in Europe by the pawns, there was to be no actual warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. And at the end of each instance of turmoil, the pieces were to be returned to where they were at the outset. This rule was observed meticulously right up to the collapse of the Communisms in 1989, which was most notably marked by the destruction of the Berlin wall.
It is perfectly true, as everyone observed at the time, that the Yalta rules were abrogated in 1989 and that the game between the United States and (as of 1991) Russia had changed radically. The major problem since then is that the United States misunderstood the new rules of the game. It proclaimed itself, and was proclaimed by many others, the lone superpower. In terms of chess rules, this was interpreted to mean that the United States was free to move about the chessboard as it saw fit, and in particular to transfer former Soviet pawns to its sphere of influence. Under Clinton, and even more spectacularly under George W. Bush, the United States proceeded to play the game this way.
There was only one problem with this: The United States was not the lone superpower; it was no longer even a superpower at all. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States had been demoted from being one of two superpowers to being one strong state in a truly multilateral distribution of real power in the interstate system. Many large countries were now able to play their own chess games without clearing their moves with one of the two erstwhile superpowers. And they began to do so.
Two major geopolitical decisions were made in the Clinton years. First, the United States pushed hard, and more or less successfully, for the incorporation of erstwhile Soviet satellites into NATO membership. These countries were themselves anxious to join, even though the key western European countries - Germany and France - were somewhat reluctant to go down this path. They saw the U.S. maneuver as one aimed in part at them, seeking to limit their newly-acquired freedom of geopolitical action.
The second key U.S. decision was to become an active player in the boundary realignments within the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This culminated in a decision to sanction, and enforce with their troops, the de facto secession of Kosovo from Serbia.
Russia, even under Yeltsin, was quite unhappy about both these U.S. actions. However, the political and economic disarray of Russia during the Yeltsin years was such that the most it could do was complain, somewhat feebly it should be added.
The coming to power of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin was more or less simultaneous. Bush decided to push the lone superpower tactics (the United States can move its pieces as it alone decides) much further than had Clinton. First, Bush in 2001 withdrew from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Then he announced that the United States would not move to ratify two new treaties signed in the Clinton years: the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the agreed changes in the SALT II nuclear disarmament treaty. Then Bush announced that the United States would move forward with its National Missile Defense system.
And of course, Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. As part of this engagement, the United States sought and obtained rights to military bases and overflight rights in the Central Asian republics that formerly were part of the Soviet Union. In addition, the United States promoted the construction of pipelines for Central Asian and Caucasian oil and natural gas that would bypass Russia. And finally, the United States entered into an agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic to establish missile defense sites, ostensibly to guard against Iranian missiles. Russia, however, regarded them as aimed at her.
Putin decided to push back much more effectually than Yeltsin. As a prudent player, however, he moved first to strengthen his home base - restoring effective central authority and reinvigorating the Russian military. At this point, the tides in the world-economy changed, and Russia suddenly became a wealthy and powerful controller not only of oil production but of the natural gas so needed by western European countries.
Putin thereupon began to act. He entered into treaty relationships with China. He maintained close relations with Iran. He began to push the United States out of its Central Asian bases. And he took a very firm stand on the further extension of NATO to two key zones - Ukraine and Georgia.
The breakup of the Soviet Union had led to ethnic secessionist movements in many former republics, including Georgia. When Georgia in 1990 sought to end the autonomous status of its non-Georgian ethnic zones, they promptly proclaimed themselves independent states. They were recognized by no one but Russia guaranteed their de facto autonomy.
The immediate spurs to the current mini-war were twofold. In February, Kosovo formally transformed its de facto autonomy to de jure independence. Its move was supported by and recognized by the United States and many western European countries. Russia warned at the time that the logic of this move applied equally to the de facto secessions in the former Soviet republics. In Georgia, Russia moved immediately, for the first time, to recognize South Ossetian de jure independence in direct response to that of Kosovo.
And in April this year, the United States proposed at the NATO meeting that Georgia and Ukraine be welcomed into a so-called Membership Action Plan. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all opposed this action, saying it would provoke Russia.
Georgia's neoliberal and strongly pro-American president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was now desperate. He saw the reassertion of Georgian authority in South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) receding forever. So, he chose a moment of Russian inattention (Putin at the Olympics, Medvedev on vacation) to invade South Ossetia. Of course, the puny South Ossetian military collapsed completely. Saakashvili expected that he would be forcing the hand of the United States (and indeed of Germany and France as well).
Instead, he got an immediate Russian military response, overwhelming the small Georgian army. What he got from George W. Bush was rhetoric. What, after all, could Bush do? The United States was not a superpower. Its armed forces were tied down in two losing wars in the Middle East. And, most important of all, the United States needed Russia far more than Russia needed the United States. Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, pointedly noted in an op-ed in the Financial Times that Russia was a "partner with the west on...the Middle East, Iran and North Korea."
As for western Europe, Russia essentially controls its gas supplies. It is no accident that it was President Sarkozy of France, not Condoleezza Rice, who negotiated the truce between Georgia and Russia. The truce contained two essential concessions by Georgia. Georgia committed itself to no further use of force in South Ossetia, and the agreement contained no reference to Georgian territorial integrity.
So, Russia emerged far stronger than before. Saakashvili had bet everything he has and was now geopolitically bankrupt. And, as an ironic footnote, Georgia, one of the last U.S. allies in the coalition in Iraq, withdrew all its 2000 troops from Iraq. These troops had been playing a crucial role in Shi'a areas, and would now have to be replaced by U.S. troops, which will have to be withdrawn from other areas.
If one plays geopolitical chess, it is best to know the rules, or one gets out-maneuvered.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
"Geopolitical Chess: Background to a Mini-war in the Caucasus"
The world has been witness this month to a mini-war in the Caucasus, and the rhetoric has been passionate, if largely irrelevant. Geopolitics is a gigantic series of two-player chess games, in which the players seek positional advantage. In these games, it is crucial to know the current rules that govern the moves. Knights are not allowed to move diagonally.
From 1945 to 1989, the principal chess game was that between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was called the Cold War, and the basic rules were called metaphorically "Yalta." The most important rule concerned a line that divided Europe into two zones of influence. It was called by Winston Churchill the "Iron Curtain" and ran from Stettin to Trieste. The rule was that, no matter how much turmoil was instigated in Europe by the pawns, there was to be no actual warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. And at the end of each instance of turmoil, the pieces were to be returned to where they were at the outset. This rule was observed meticulously right up to the collapse of the Communisms in 1989, which was most notably marked by the destruction of the Berlin wall.
It is perfectly true, as everyone observed at the time, that the Yalta rules were abrogated in 1989 and that the game between the United States and (as of 1991) Russia had changed radically. The major problem since then is that the United States misunderstood the new rules of the game. It proclaimed itself, and was proclaimed by many others, the lone superpower. In terms of chess rules, this was interpreted to mean that the United States was free to move about the chessboard as it saw fit, and in particular to transfer former Soviet pawns to its sphere of influence. Under Clinton, and even more spectacularly under George W. Bush, the United States proceeded to play the game this way.
There was only one problem with this: The United States was not the lone superpower; it was no longer even a superpower at all. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States had been demoted from being one of two superpowers to being one strong state in a truly multilateral distribution of real power in the interstate system. Many large countries were now able to play their own chess games without clearing their moves with one of the two erstwhile superpowers. And they began to do so.
Two major geopolitical decisions were made in the Clinton years. First, the United States pushed hard, and more or less successfully, for the incorporation of erstwhile Soviet satellites into NATO membership. These countries were themselves anxious to join, even though the key western European countries - Germany and France - were somewhat reluctant to go down this path. They saw the U.S. maneuver as one aimed in part at them, seeking to limit their newly-acquired freedom of geopolitical action.
The second key U.S. decision was to become an active player in the boundary realignments within the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This culminated in a decision to sanction, and enforce with their troops, the de facto secession of Kosovo from Serbia.
Russia, even under Yeltsin, was quite unhappy about both these U.S. actions. However, the political and economic disarray of Russia during the Yeltsin years was such that the most it could do was complain, somewhat feebly it should be added.
The coming to power of George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin was more or less simultaneous. Bush decided to push the lone superpower tactics (the United States can move its pieces as it alone decides) much further than had Clinton. First, Bush in 2001 withdrew from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Then he announced that the United States would not move to ratify two new treaties signed in the Clinton years: the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the agreed changes in the SALT II nuclear disarmament treaty. Then Bush announced that the United States would move forward with its National Missile Defense system.
And of course, Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. As part of this engagement, the United States sought and obtained rights to military bases and overflight rights in the Central Asian republics that formerly were part of the Soviet Union. In addition, the United States promoted the construction of pipelines for Central Asian and Caucasian oil and natural gas that would bypass Russia. And finally, the United States entered into an agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic to establish missile defense sites, ostensibly to guard against Iranian missiles. Russia, however, regarded them as aimed at her.
Putin decided to push back much more effectually than Yeltsin. As a prudent player, however, he moved first to strengthen his home base - restoring effective central authority and reinvigorating the Russian military. At this point, the tides in the world-economy changed, and Russia suddenly became a wealthy and powerful controller not only of oil production but of the natural gas so needed by western European countries.
Putin thereupon began to act. He entered into treaty relationships with China. He maintained close relations with Iran. He began to push the United States out of its Central Asian bases. And he took a very firm stand on the further extension of NATO to two key zones - Ukraine and Georgia.
The breakup of the Soviet Union had led to ethnic secessionist movements in many former republics, including Georgia. When Georgia in 1990 sought to end the autonomous status of its non-Georgian ethnic zones, they promptly proclaimed themselves independent states. They were recognized by no one but Russia guaranteed their de facto autonomy.
The immediate spurs to the current mini-war were twofold. In February, Kosovo formally transformed its de facto autonomy to de jure independence. Its move was supported by and recognized by the United States and many western European countries. Russia warned at the time that the logic of this move applied equally to the de facto secessions in the former Soviet republics. In Georgia, Russia moved immediately, for the first time, to recognize South Ossetian de jure independence in direct response to that of Kosovo.
And in April this year, the United States proposed at the NATO meeting that Georgia and Ukraine be welcomed into a so-called Membership Action Plan. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all opposed this action, saying it would provoke Russia.
Georgia's neoliberal and strongly pro-American president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was now desperate. He saw the reassertion of Georgian authority in South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) receding forever. So, he chose a moment of Russian inattention (Putin at the Olympics, Medvedev on vacation) to invade South Ossetia. Of course, the puny South Ossetian military collapsed completely. Saakashvili expected that he would be forcing the hand of the United States (and indeed of Germany and France as well).
Instead, he got an immediate Russian military response, overwhelming the small Georgian army. What he got from George W. Bush was rhetoric. What, after all, could Bush do? The United States was not a superpower. Its armed forces were tied down in two losing wars in the Middle East. And, most important of all, the United States needed Russia far more than Russia needed the United States. Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, pointedly noted in an op-ed in the Financial Times that Russia was a "partner with the west on...the Middle East, Iran and North Korea."
As for western Europe, Russia essentially controls its gas supplies. It is no accident that it was President Sarkozy of France, not Condoleezza Rice, who negotiated the truce between Georgia and Russia. The truce contained two essential concessions by Georgia. Georgia committed itself to no further use of force in South Ossetia, and the agreement contained no reference to Georgian territorial integrity.
So, Russia emerged far stronger than before. Saakashvili had bet everything he has and was now geopolitically bankrupt. And, as an ironic footnote, Georgia, one of the last U.S. allies in the coalition in Iraq, withdrew all its 2000 troops from Iraq. These troops had been playing a crucial role in Shi'a areas, and would now have to be replaced by U.S. troops, which will have to be withdrawn from other areas.
If one plays geopolitical chess, it is best to know the rules, or one gets out-maneuvered.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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