daduh

As my date laughed, the crow's feet by her eyes widened from lines to full crevasses, like a river having carved out little ravines. Certainly, by the look of her forty-two years, she had been born in a prior geologic age. But then, so had I.

She had just uttered some quip about a college internship, which I missed because my attention had been diverted by a young waitress, with a very tight figure, performing the bee dance with her ass. The waitress waddled along provocatively to some other table holding several full plates in one hand, but my date's eyes had slow-blinked in laughter at just that moment. I don't think she noticed.

So that's how they got Litvinenko.

It was a bit thicker than a thread of hair; no longer than a BB pellet; dead black, with little spindly appendages wiggling and grasping about upwards. He rolled the device between his thumb and forefinger until it was but a thin reddish smear.

I survived! This time. Miniature bots. Nanobots. They can be bugs, parasites watching and listening to every second of your life. Or killers, filled with Polonium 239. Tiny things designed to attach and listen until they're told to exercise extreme prejudice. That's how they kill these days. Christ I need a cigarette.

"Curl-Free Vector Potential Effects in a Simply Connected Space"
Raymond C. Gelinas
Scanned from the 1986 Tesla Symposium

ABSTRACT:

A gauge invariant expression for the phase difference between two points of a wavefunction is derived using the Schrodinger equation for a charged particle in the presence of a vector potential. Such a phase difference is found to be the gauge invariant in a simply connected space in the quantum formalism. As applies to the Aharonov and Bohm effect, these findings therefore show that a multiply connected space is not an essential condition for establishing gauge invariance. That the Aharonov and Bohm experiements are constrained by a requirement for a multiply connected space, is a consequence of the properties of electron beams which cannot provide two separate sources of mutually phase coherent de Broglie waves. The macroscopic quantum interference properties of the superconducting Josephson junction are described. It is shown that a Josephson junction provides quantum interference between two mutually phase coherent souces of superconductive wavefunctions and therefore enables detection of curl-free vector potential effects in a simply connected space. An experiment is described to detect a change in phase difference of the superconductive wavefunction across a Josephson junction caused by a remote source of curl-free vector potential.

Click here for full paper in pdf form.

Dale Klein, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), was interviewed on C-SPAN's Newsmakers this last Sunday on October 22nd, 2006. Regarding twenty nine recent pending license requests for the construction of new nuclear power plants in the US, he stated that there will be a nuclear renaissance in the United States:

"I do believe that we will see license applications in 2007 and we are looking – we have expressions of intent from a lot of the utilities indicating up – as I said, up to about 29 new nuclear plants. So I believe that there will be a [nuclear] renaissance in the United States."

In a joint announcement, both NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) have released findings from the Aura satellite which shows that from September 21st through the 30th of 2006, the Antarctic ozone hole was the largest ever recorded.

"From September 21 to 30, the average area of the ozone hole was the largest ever observed, at 10.6 million square miles," said Paul Newman, atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. If the stratospheric weather conditions had been normal, the ozone hole would be expected to reach a size of about 8.9 to 9.3 million square miles, about the surface area of North America.

The Guardian reports on a series of recent studies showing that feeding vitamin and Omega 3 fatty acid supplements may decrease violence among repeat offenders by as much as 37%. These results are leading researchers, and some psychiatrists, to conclude that at least some violent outbursts and other mental disorders are the result of vitamin and essential fatty acid deficiency.

In the wake of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Will The Next Election Be Hacked?, and this conservative leaning NewsMax article, concern for voter fraud is rampant among members of both political parties. In response to these longstanding concerns, in 2005 a bipartisan commission chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, recommended requiring that voters present a photoID to poll workers to prove citizenship prior to voting. In response to the commission's recommendation, this month the house passed a bill which would do just that. Yet the ACLU argues that photoID legislation would disenfranchise large numbers of infirm, elderly, and poor.

Questions remain: will photoID legislation actually solve the stated problem, is the social cost greater than the problem stated, and are there cheaper alternatives which could meet both goals of reduced voter fraud and increased citizen access to the polls?

Recently, United Press International, printed a New York Times story that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency had issued a report stating that inspectors had found "... highly enriched uranium ... at an Iranian facility," and that this uranium did "... not match that found on earlier samples," which they concluded had come from "...contaminated equipment from Pakistan." [UPI report used due to NY Times firewall] Due to this reporting, I argued in a DailyKos thread that the IAEA (and thus the administration) would appear to have a slam dunk case against Iran for nuclear weapons production, and not nuclear energy production as Iran claims. Yet the Washington Post reported today that IAEA inspectors disputed a recent House Committee report on Iranian nuclear capabilities, calling the committee's claim that Iran had created highly enriched uranium "outrageous and dishonest" and offering facts to dispute the House report.

So which is it: Are they or are they not enriching uranium to weapons grade?

Recently, The Guardian reported on the results of an Orange Prize for Fiction commissioned study by Professor Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins where, according to the article, they interviewed: '500 men, many of whom had some professional connection with literature, about the novels that had changed their lives.' According to Professor Jardine, who was quoted in the article: "We were completely taken aback by the results," and was paraphrased by the reporter as saying: 'that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliché, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle.' An interesting result even if, in a minor discrepancy, the Orange Prize Press Release on the study states that the researchers had interviewed '... 400 men from the worlds of academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism ...' and not 500. But what do her reported results mean, if anything at all?

By now it has become common knowledge that Redstate site founder Ben Domenech, or Augustine under his pseudonym, is a plagiarist.

The son of Doug Domenech, White House liason to the Department of the Interior, he was hired in March by the Washington Post to run a new blog called Red America. He resigned in disgrace with only a few short posts published after only three days on the job. The discovery of numerous instances of plagiarism dating back from his student newspaper days at The Flat Hat, all the way through to the Post itself, included text from a P.J. O'Roark book and numerous movie and music reviews taken from sites such as Salon.com. According to editors at The Flat Hat, of 35 articles published 10 appear to contain "suspicious" similarities to other work. Further, work published in the the professoinal publication National Review shows signs of plagiarism. This behavior looks to have extended across his entire, if brief, career until his outing at the young age of 24.

Science Daily reports that researchers at Imperial College London have published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B which links Toxoplasma gondii, a parasitic protozoa which as part of its life cycle is excreted within cat feces, to schizophrenia. The findings show that when rats are fed Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic, and Valproic acid, a mood stabilizer and anti-convulsant, replication of T. gondii within a host organism appears to be inhibited.

Rapid international market liberalization is breaking down nationalist protectionism policies throughout the world. As a result, a divide between the higher wages and better living standards of the workforce in the industrial nations, against those in the cheaper developing third world, have given multinational business an incentive to move manufacturing offshore. Such a move requires significant shipping of raw materials to the manufacturing plants and finished goods to market. What happens if shipping costs exceed labor savings due to higher energy rates? Below the fold, this article explores that issue.

SLiGO pub, what a shithole. Situated on a dead end street between a dilapidated triple-decker and a refuse filled empty lot, it's a one story windowless box slathered in grimy stucco veneer. In front, blowing trash and empty liquor bottles litter a crumbling cement sidewalk and pothole filled asphalt road. Interspersed along the street, the empty metal frames of several decayed cars lay torn asunder, like bones picked clean by vultures - scattered debris, deteriorating in the elements. At the entrance, the pub's only sign is a warning that reads 21 and Over; regulars learn the name as if by osmosis.

Jonathan Weisman, economics reporter for the Washington Post, admitted in an informal posting on Poynter that the White House demanded he rewrite a quote [REFERENCE DEAD] taken 'off the record' from an unnamed administration official before they would provide approval for final publication. In his post he clearly admits that he "[...]violated journalistic ethics, by placing into quotation marks a phrase that was never uttered by the source[...]", and then published the story as news.

March 7th, 2003, at an official press briefing, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer twice admitted under questioning that the President's staff preselected which reporters to call, and the order, for the East Room Press Conference on the evening of March 6th, 2003. This Press Conference was President Bush's eighth solo news conference since inauguration, and the second formally presented in the East Room during prime time.

Mr. Fleischer responded to a reporter's query over a short gaffe in which the President was heard to say to a reporter, "You'll be there in a moment," upon which he then called CNN correspondent John King and remarked "...this is a scripted...[pause]", after which an outburst of laughter from the press pool could be heard. The president then moved directly onto the next question. An audio excerpt of this gaff is available from this Buzzflash commentary. [*]

This is my first feature article written for the now defunct Cincinnati, OH alternative weekly Everybody's News, published November 10-16 1995, issue #374. At the time mifepristone, or RU-486, had not been FDA approved and it was unclear if or when it ever would be. FDA finally did approve the drug September 28, 2000 - just over five years after publication. While the article is old and contains some outdated information, the fact that RU-486 is getting recent media attention for deaths after use might generate some interest. Should the FDA revoke approval for RU-486, methotrexate is a known safe alternative as an abortofacient. Given that over ten years after writing this article methotrexate still hasn't been approved by the FDA as an alternative drug induced abortion, when it continues to be used for a wide variety of other ailments, only shows that FDA unwillingness to approve drug induced abortion is a political and not a medical decision. Should RU-486 be taken off the market, off-label prescription of this drug for abortion may once again be considered as a viable option by physicians.

The New England Journal of Medicine has available an abstract of Dr. Hausknecht's original August, 1995, study: Methotrexate and Misoprostol to Terminate Early Pregnancy.