Stephen Hawking says the Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe — reported in the Telegraph:
The scientist has claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed.
In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”
In A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking’s most famous work, he did not dismiss the possibility that God had a hand in the creation of the world.
He wrote in the 1988 book: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
In his new book he rejects Sir Isaac Newton’s theory that the Universe did not spontaneously begin to form but was set in motion by God…
[continues in the Telegraph]
The lunatic who took hostages at Discovery Channel’s headquarters was killed by police. He did have a point about their crappy programming, let’s admit. From the New York Times:
Police officers shot and killed a gunman with a history of protesting against the Discovery Channel, the authorities said, ending a nearly four-hour ordeal on Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. The gunman, apparently wearing explosives, had taken two employees and a security guard hostage, officials said.
The company had identified the gunman…as James J. Lee. A Web site run by Mr. Lee, SaveThePlanetProtest.com, was established in January 2008. The Web site complains that the Discovery Channel produces programs about the environment for profit, not for humanitarian reasons.
In case there weren’t enough social networks, Apple’s Ping is the network for music, not friends. From NY Times:
On Thursday morning, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, showed off a new social network for music called Ping. It runs inside the newest version of Apple’s iTunes software. Ping also works on the latest software for iPhones and iPod Touches. (Apple hasn’t made it available for iPad this time around.)
Ping, Mr. Jobs said onstage at the announcement event in San Francisco, lets its users answer three burning questions: “What are my friends listening to? What are my favorite artists up to? What concerts are my friends going to?” And, he said, it resolves the driving need, “I’ve got to share this with my friends!” (It also answers the question: “Can I buy that song right now?”)
How does Ping work? Mr. Jobs describes it as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes. It’s a social network all about music.” Just as you may follow friends on Facebook, you can follow other Ping users. It may be the kid next door, or it may be Lady GaGa, who provided Jobs with a pre-recorded video clip for his stage show. Ping will let you know what music the people you follow are listening to, downloading, or just talking about.
Continues at NY Times …
Divers investigating a 200 year-old shipwreck in the Baltic Sea found what is thought to be the world’s oldest champagne. And it’s sill drinkable! From New Tang Dynasty Television:
Last week one of the rarest and more horrifying weather phenomena occurred in Brazil: a “fire tornado.” Created by extreme drought conditions, the whirling tower of flames raged outside of the city of Aracatuba, scorching dry earth and bringing traffic to a halt, before disappearing.
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Hey, I guess if you’re one of the last of your kind, you must try to propagate the species by any means possible. Too bad that this zoologist’s head looks like one of this bird’s kind. From the BBC program Last Chance to See:
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine head to the ends of the earth in search of animals on the edge of extinction. In New Zealand the travellers make their way through one of the most dramatic landscapes in the world. They are on a journey to find the last remaining kakapo, a fat, flightless parrot which, when threatened with attack, adopts a strategy of standing very still indeed.
Is this the future in a world where we socialize online rather than in person? Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for the Wall Street Journal:
ATAMI, Japan—This resort town, once popular with honeymooners, is turning to a new breed of romance seekers—virtual sweethearts.
Since the marriage rate among Japan’s shrinking population is falling and with many of the country’s remaining lovebirds heading for Hawaii or Australia’s Gold Coast, Atami had to do something. It is trying to attract single men—and their handheld devices.
In the first month of the city’s promotional campaign launched July 10, more than 1,500 male fans of the Japanese dating-simulation game LovePlus+ have flocked to Atami for a romantic date with their videogame character girlfriends.
The men are real. The girls are cartoon characters on a screen. The trips are actual, can be expensive and aim to re-create the virtual weekend outing featured in the game, a product of Konami Corp. played on Nintendo Co.’s DS videogame system.
“Atami has always been a romantic place, but it is now a romantic place for a modern generation,” says Sakae Saito, Atami’s mayor.
Love Plus+ re-creates the experience of an adolescent romance. The goal isn’t just to get the girl but to maintain a relationship with her.
After choosing one of three female characters—goodie-goodie Manaka, sassy Rinko or big-sister type Nene—to be a steady girlfriend, the player taps a stylus on the DS touch-screen in order to walk hand-in-hand to school, exchange flirtatious text messages and even meet in the school courtyard for a little afternoon kiss. Using the device’s built-in microphone, the player can carry on sweet, albeit mundane, conversations…
[continues in the Wall Street Journal]
It’s certainly quite a sea change in media coverage of climate change issues in the UK! From the Daily Express:
The world’s leading climate change body has been accused of losing credibility after a damning report into its research practices.
A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.
It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.
The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
The panel was forced to admit its key claim in support of global warming was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed by research.
Independent climate scientist Peter Taylor said last night: “The IPCC’s credibility has been deeply dented and something has to be done. It can’t just be a matter of adjusting the practices. They have got to look at what are the consequences of having got it wrong in terms of what the public think is going on. Admitting that it needs to reform means something has gone wrong and they really do need to look at the science.”
Climate change sceptic David Holland, who challenged leading climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia to disclose their research, said: “The panel is definitely not fit for purpose. What the IAC has said is substantial changes need to be made.”
The IAC, which comprises the world’s top science academies including the UK’s Royal Society, made recommendations to the IPCC to “enhance its credibility and independence” after the Himalayan glaciers report, which severely damaged the reputation of climate science.
It condemned the panel – set up by the UN to ensure world leaders had the best scientific advice on climate change – for its “slow and inadequate response” after the damaging errors emerged.
Among the blunders in the 2007 report were claims that 55 per cent of the Netherlands was below sea level when the figure is 26 per cent.
It also claimed that water supplies for between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa will be at risk by 2020 due to climate change, but the real range is between 90 and 220 million.
The claim that glaciers would melt by 2035 was also rejected…
[continues in the Daily Express]
If you’re in the Atlanta area over Labor Day weekend, come and meet Graham Hancock at Dragon*Con 2010 and Eyedrum Atlanta. If you can’t make it, Graham will be touring North America this fall in support of his new book Entangled: The Eater of Souls. More info is available at www.chronotrack.org and www.eyedrum.org.
Here’s the complete schedule of events, please RSVP on Facebook if you can make it. Hope to see you there!
EYEDRUM ATLANTA More info at www.eyedrum.org.
Date: Friday 9/3 Time: 8 PM
Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods and Supernatural, will be appearing at Eyedrum on Friday, September 3 in support of his new book, Entangled. Randall Carlson from Sacred Geometry Atlanta will be the opening speaker. Admission is $5.
If you can invite fifty over more people in Atlanta over Facebook to this event over Facebook your admission is free. Please contact programs [at] disinfo.com for more info..
FOUR DRAGON*CON 2010 EVENTS !!! Full schedule at www.DragonCon.org
Panel: Hollywood vs. History History doesn’t always translate well to the silver screen — or does it? Participants discuss films in a fast-paced, round-robin format. Panelists: K. Hinds, E. Flint, S. M. Stirling, A. J. Hartley, G. D. Falksen, G. Hancock Date/Time: Friday, 9/3 5:30 PM Location: International C – Westin
Panel: Far Be It From Me… A rousing debate on revisionist vs. ‘traditional’ history and the evolution of historical presentation.. Panelists: B. Linaweaver, E. Flint, S. M. Stirling, A. J. Hartley, G. Hancock Date/Time: Saturday, 9/4 4:00 PM Location: International C – Westin
Panel: 2012 Theories and myths surrounding 2012 from various cultures. Is there hope? Is it real? Are we doomed? Panelists: E. Donald, E. Dunin, M. B. Weston, G. Hancock, K. Brewer, G. Baddeley, R. Carlson Date/Time: Sunday, 9/5 4:00 PM Location: L508 – Marriott
Presentation: Aliens, Angels and Ayahuasca Graham Hancock will take you on a mind-trip through history showing evidence that alien encounters & UFO’s are nothing new… ? Location: International C – Westin
We will be listing more events here on disinfo.com and Facebook and look for Entangled: The Eater of Souls this fall in a book near you.
This evening, President Obama will announce the end of the combat mission in Iraq as well as the reduction of the number of troops in Middle East during a primetime news conference. Hulu will begin streaming live coverage of the news conference tonight at 8:00 p.m. EST.
The live stream will run approximately 60 minutes, ending at approximately 9:00 p.m. EST.
The recent rally led by Glenn Beck brought together an interesting assortment of characters. The New Left Media recorded various interviews with some of the attendees. More interesting than the claims they make, most had wrong or speculated information, yet not a single person cited a source from where their information was coming from. Of course except the one women who receives her immigration “facts” from her sister.
Like so many household supplies, cough suppressants have found their way into the drug culture. The FDA is now looking into how to restrict the access to dextromethorphan, the “euphoric” ingredient, especially to the targeted “robotripping” group of adolescents. LA Times reports:
Federal health regulators are weighing restrictions on Robitussin, NyQuil and other cough suppressants to curb cases of abuse that send thousands of people to the hospital each year.
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday posted its review of dextromethorphan, an ingredient found in more than 100 over-the-counter medications that is sometimes abused for its euphoric effects. The practice, dubbed “robotripping,” involves taking more than 25 times the recommended dose of a cold medicine and is mainly associated with teenagers.
At high doses the drug causes increased blood pressure, heart rate and fever. Abusers can also suffer side effects from other ingredients mixed in cough medicines, such as acetaminophen, which can cause liver damage.
“Because of the drug’s perceived safety, ease of availability, and desired psychoactive effects, it is sought after by those seeking to alter their mental state,” states the FDA review.According to the FDA, inappropriate use of the ingredient was linked to nearly 8,000 emergency room visits in 2008. That was up more than 70 percent from reports in 2004.
Continues at LA Times …
TIME reports on a findings that contradict what we’ve been taught our entire lives regarding the perils of alcoholism: it turns out that people who are heavy drinkers live longer than people who have always been nondrinkers. (And that’s after controlling for nearly all the variables one could think up.) Do teetotalers die early because they miss out on the release from stress that alcohol provides so well?
a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one’s risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers’ mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.
Even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.
A virtual curriculum, high-tech classes, and a lounge-style classroom; not your typical school for 11th graders. With the Superintendent of Schools as the acting principle, iPrep Academy opened last week. From Miami Herald:
Photo from English Heritage
Summers with dry weather seems uncommon in England, but this summer the dry agricultural fields revealed new marks depicting buried features from the past. BBC News reports:
Hundreds of ancient sites have been discovered by aerial surveys, thanks to a dry start to the summer, English Heritage has said.
The surveys show marks made when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those nearby.
The newly-discovered Roman and prehistoric settlements include a site near Bradford Abbas, Dorset.
The Roman camp was revealed in June after three sides became visible in sun-parched fields of barley.
The lightly-built defensive enclosure would have provided basic protection for Roman soldiers while on manoeuvres in the first century AD and is one of only four discovered in the south west of England, English Heritage said.
Continues at BBC …
Google, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix … it’s only a matter of time till Blockbuster files for bankruptcy. In case we didn’t already have enough access to instant movie viewing, Google is looking for a new deal with Hollywood studios. From Wired:
Google is reportedly in talks with the major movie studios to launch full-length video rentals on YouTube by year’s end.
YouTube has already experimented with film rentals, offering selections from the Sundance Festival earlier this year when it would not rule out the addition of Hollywood movies. And the site was reportedly in talks with the same studios around this time last year, so this does not come as much of a surprise, the Financial Times’ “scoop” notwithstanding.
However, YouTube’s movie rental program currently focuses on independent filmmakers and music artists. The addition of mainstream, pay-per-view feature films to YouTube would represent a significant development, regardless of how long these reported talks have been ongoing (at least a year).
Most of us want to watch full-length films on our large, flatscreen televisions and — if we’re lucky — our surround sound speaker systems, which transform any living room into a private movie theater delightfully lacking in other people, their cellphones, and their crinkly candy wrappers.
Continues at Wired ….
Neuroscientist David Eagleman hatched an experiment to learn about why our sense of time slows to a crawl in near-death situations (such as a free fall from a significant height). Disappointingly, it’s not because our abilities of perception kick into Matrix-style hyperdrive. NPR reports:
“Turns out, when you’re falling you don’t actually see in slow motion. It’s not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work,” David says. “It’s something more interesting than that.”
According to David, it’s all about memory, not turbo perception. “Normally, our memories are like sieves,” he says. “We’re not writing down most of what’s passing through our system.” Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it’s writing down everything — every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.
Because of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. The slow-motion effect may be your brain’s way of making sense of all this extra information. “When you read that back out,” David says, “the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time.” But really, in a crisis situation, you’re getting a peek into all the pictures and smells and thoughts that usually just pass through your brain and float away, forgotten forever.
In an article for Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that as mega-cities wield increasing political and economic power, the structures and sovereignty of the “countries” that contain them becomes less important. In other words, global power struggles will be less America vs. China vs. Russia and more London vs. Mumbai vs. Tokyo, with the people outside of the super-cities being of little consequence.
In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones.
Time, technology, and population growth have massively accelerated the advent of this new urbanized era. Already, more than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world’s economy, and almost all its innovation. Many are world capitals that have evolved and adapted through centuries of dominance: London, New York, Paris. New York City’s economy alone is larger than 46 of sub-Saharan Africa’s economies combined.
At the same time, a new category of megacities is emerging around the world, dwarfing anything that has come before. Many will pose challenges to the countries that give birth to them. For though no nation can succeed without at least one thriving urban anchor — and even then, a functioning Kabul or Sarajevo is still no guarantee of national survival — it’s also true that globalization allows major cities to pull away from their home states, a reality captured by the massive and potentially dangerous wealth gap between city and countryside in second-world countries such as Brazil, China, India, and Turkey.
This one just won’t go away, will it? President Obama takes a break from his vacation to talk to NBC to protest widespread belief that he is a Muslim. Oh and he also says “I can’t spend all my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead”!
You have to hand it to him — Glenn Beck has come a long way from his humble cable TV and radio origins, taking Washington by storm today. What should we make of him? Is he a racist? Does he want to be President? What’s his relationship with Sarah Palin about? The Mormon thing?
Former Cuban president Fidel Castro meets Lithuanian author and conspiracy theorist Daniel Estulin in Havana. Photograph: Alex Castro/EPA
Why should it take Castro for this to make headlines? It’s not exactly new news after all… Good publicity for Daniel Estulin though! From the Guardian:
Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.
But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America’s intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.
Castro told a visiting Lithuanian writer, who is known as a font of intriguing conspiracy theories about plots for world domination, that Bin Laden was working for the White House.
“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”
He said that thousands of pages of American classified documents made public by WikiLeaks pointed to who the al-Qaida leader is really working for.
“Who showed that he [Bin Laden] is indeed a CIA agent was WikiLeaks. It proved it with documents,” he said, but did not explain exactly how.
He made his comments during a meeting with Daniel Estulin, the author of three books about the secretive Bilderberg Club which includes men such as Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, leading European officials and business executives. Estulin says that the club is form of secret world government, manipulating economies and political systems…
[continues at the Guardian]
Saturday MIT reveals a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill. The 16-foot robots drag a nanowire mesh that acts like a conveyor belt to soak up surface oil “like paper towels soak up water,” absorbing 20 times its weight and then harmlessly “digesting” the oil by burning it off.
Powered by 21.5 square feet of solar panels, the “Seaswarm” robots run on the power of a lightbulb, and with just 100 watts “could potentially clean continuously for weeks” without human intervention, MIT announced. (”They require little to no maintenance and can work around the clock cleaning up spills,” notes one technology blog.) The swarm uses GPS data and communicates wirelessly to move as a coordinated group to “corral, absorb and process” oil spills, and MIT researchers estimate that a fleet of 5,000 could clean up a gulf-sized spill within one month. They were directed by Senseable City Lab, where an associate director notes that “Small oil leaks happen constantly in off shore drilling,” adding that their goal was to design “a simple, inexpensive cleaning system to address this problem.”
Diaspora (in Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]“) is any movement of a population sharing common national and/or ethnic identity. The new Facebook? Via Wired:
Diaspora, a nascent open competitor to Facebook that raised $200,000 from online contributors (including, ahem, the top dog at Facebook) will launch its much-anticipated service Sept. 15, the company said in a blog post Thursday.
The project aims to create a social network that puts users in charge of their own data — or as Diaspora puts it, a “privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all open source social network.”
Diaspora was started by four New York University students earlier this year after hearing a talk from Free Software guru Eban Moglen, who said Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had done more harm to the world than anyone his age ever had.
Diaspora’s idea of taking on the social network giant gained momentum and wide publicity in the spring, following yet another controversial Facebook attempt to make users share more information publicly.
Continues at Wired …
Many were surprised at a week-old poll showing that twenty percent of Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. But the stupidity of our populace extends to many areas of life. Thus, Newsweek took the opportunity to make a list of some of the dumbest things that Americans believe. For example, twenty-one percent of Americans believe in witches, and twenty percent are sure that the sun revolves around the earth.
Didn’t we clear this one up in the 16th century? Copernicus be damned, 20 percent of Americans were still sure in 1999 that the sun revolved around the Earth. Gallup, the pollster that conducted the study, gamely tried to dress it up by celebrating the fact that “four out of five Americans know Earth revolves around the sun,” but we’re not buying.
Thirty-three Chilean miners have sent a video to their loved ones showing high spirits after being located. They have been trapped since the cave-in on August 5, but may have to wait another three months before seeing daylight. Via ITN News:
After a twenty year wait, Kenya finally celebrates their new US-style constitution. The Telegraph reports:
The new US-style laws include a Bill of Rights and reforms to policies designed to address long-held grievances over land stolen by corrupt politicians.
Some 49 bills now have to pass through parliament to bring into effect some of the key parts of the constitution.
Demands for the constitution stretch back to the end of one-party rule by former president Daniel Arap Moi at the beginning of the 1990s.
Two-thirds of Kenyans voted to approve the new document in a referendum held earlier this month.
It was a key plank of the peace deal brokered by Kofi Annan to end the country’s post-election violence in 2008.
“I was just a small girl when we first started talking of this new constitution,” said Jane Karanja, one of thousands who gathered waving Kenya’s black, red and green flag at a Nairobi park for the ceremony.
“I never thought it would come. Everyone you see here is very happy, it is a new dawn for Kenya.”
Continues at Telegraph …
Taiwan’s Next Media Animation presents another in their series of incredible CGI renderings of U.S. news events, this time doing an overview of recent Islamaphobia in America, including the anti-ground-zero-mosque protests, proposed Koran-burnings in Florida, and (the highlight) Barack Obama as an evil crypto-muslim.
Now he tells us! From AP:
Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the federal official at the heart of a firestorm over Washington’s slow response is acknowledging the government’s shortcomings.
Former Federal Emergency Management agency director Mike Brown tells NBC’s “Today” show “there was a disconnect” about what the Bush administration was saying about the situation, and how bad things actually were.Brown said “there was a mentality in Washington which says you put the best face on everything.” He said information given out by the administration was accurate, but “we never put it in context” with how much still needed to be done to lift the stricken city…
[continues at AP]
As if beatings from wardens and guards weren’t bad enough… from Salon.com:
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
The sheriff unveiled the device last week and said it would be installed in the dorm of a jail in north Los Angeles County…