an American soldier reported the abuse
There are some things going on here that I can't live with.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US military in torture scandal
There are some things going on here that I can't live with.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US military in torture scandal
Inside the psychedelic, rave and harm-reduction communities, Earth and Fire are considered leaders, even heroes. But they insist they’re just a pair of librarians — archivists and "Internet dorks" who believe that better access to better information just makes for better decisions in the long run. "Basically, we act as if there isn’t prohibition," says Earth. "We are trying to publish this information as if the world were already making rational choices around this complicated area."
The LA Weekly explores the Vaults of Erowid in Don’t Get High Without It by Erik Davis.
The Slashdot: Apple Releases Major iTunes Update discussion includes the following gems (unattributed, because I'm lazy):
Lastly, and this is a feature of the entire music library, not just playlists or Party Shuffle, the same "arrow" icons that show up in the iTMS when you search for a song are present in iTunes. This means you can click an arrow for a song name, album, or artist and it will launch a search on iTMS. But say you don't like that feature? Well you can of course turn it off in preferences, but you may also hodl down "option" and click it. The result? it searches only YOUR library, not the iTMS.
You can now use other playlists as criteria for a Smart Playlist. Create one playlist that is a combination of several other playlists.
Question: I was pulling the onion grass out of one of my beds and decided to pull up the weed barrier (the black meshy sheet that we laid under our mulch last year to stifle the weeds) and sure enough there were about 25 large, somewhat hibernating cicadas. I guess my question is, we laid that weed barrier all around our beds. Will the cicadas be trapped under there? Is that a bad thing?
Adrian Higgins: The cicadas will be trapped under your barrier. They have waited 17 years for this moment, and you are preventing them from attaining their destiny. For 17 years, they have nibbled together on tree roots, enduring the hardships with the knowledge that one day, they would smell the fresh air, feel the warmth of the sun on their bodies, experience the thrill of flight, and of true love. If you leave the weed block down, these cicadas will never live their dream. But you be the judge.
Bear with me, it's a good story: heraldsun.com: The buzz: Cicadas get ready to emerge
The Brood X bugs, red-eyed cousins of the larger annual black-eyed late-summer "Dog Day" green cicadas, will begin emerging from their underground holes in western North Carolina later this month. They don't devour vegetation the way locusts do, and they don't bite or sting. But they sure do sing.
Like many human adolescents, periodical cicadas spend umpteen years in their dirty rooms, indulging in sweet stuff and oblivious to much of the world outside themselves. Then, suddenly, as if a hormone switch were flipped, they emerge with a single-minded commitment to find favor with whatever peer they deem sexually appealing.
The bug nymphs live all that time on tender hardwood tree roots until they finally get the hots. Well, it's more like the "warms," because their signal to go forth and mate is a rise in the soil temperature to 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
Once in heat, millions of them push their way to the surface and climb onto new branch growth on nearby trees and shrubs, according to entomologist Stephen Bambara, who works with the N.C. State Cooperative Extension Service in Raleigh.
The males get together in choruses and harmonize in a unique doo-wop that strikes humans as a decidedly un-sexy metallic screeching. But cicada females respond to it with abandon, making clicking sounds and wing flips -- their version of an air kiss and a toss of the hair.
After 13 or 17 years of underground obscurity, periodical cicadas emerge to a multi-week Mardi Gras, a party thrown by nature solely to ensure that what goes around comes around, generation after generation. Like most such reveries, it's noisy, it's not pretty, and many participants meet violent fates from predators. But in this case, it gets the job done, according to Bambara, because the weird life cycle itself offers a form of protection for the species.
"Cicadas go 13 or 17 years between life cycles because it's to their advantage," said Bambara. "It throws possible predators off track. Seventeen years is a long time to wait between meals if that were your prey. So I think that's where they got their niche. A lot of them are consumed and die when they come out. But their sheer numbers also help ensure their survival. Even if a lot of them get eaten, a lot of others are still left to reproduce."
Birds are periodical cicadas' main predators, he said, plus other omnivorous ground-dwelling animals such as opossums, skunks, raccoons and foxes. Fish, too, eat cicadas that fall into the water.
Cicata Field Guide: Cicada (“Si-Kay-Duh”) Common Name: Periodical Cicada Scientific Name: Magicicada Aliases: 13 or 17 Year Cicada; 13 or 17 Year Locust; Satan’s Parakeets
You think just because the words are garbled in his mouth, they're garbled in his mind?
With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.
AND, helped by his growing prominence in Hollywood through his second company, Pixar Animation Studios, Mr. Jobs has attained a level of influence over how life is lived in the digital age that is unmatched by even his most powerful computer industry rivals. "He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era," said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.
The New York Times > Technology > Rich to Get Richer if Google Goes Public
The current prediction is that Google, if it decides to sell shares to investors this year, would probably end up with a market value of $20 billion to $25 billion by the end of its first day as a publicly traded company.
A $25 billion market value would instantly make Google worth more than Lockheed Martin, the big military contractor; Federal Express, the package delivery service; or Nike, the sports clothing maker.
"The Atari Paddle TV Games controller looks, feels, and plays just like the original Atari paddle. Games featured in the device include: Breakout, Canyon Bomber, Casino, Circus Atari,Demons to Diamonds, Night Driver, Steeplechase, Street Racer, Super Breakout, Warlords, Warlords Arcade, Video Olympics, Arcade Pong and Pong. There will be two types of Atari Paddle TV Games units released this summer: single player and two player. The Atari Paddle TV Games will ship for approximately $20 this summer."
Too bad there's not a four player version. Four player Warlords was the most fun four kids hopped up on pizza and coca-cola taking a break from Dungeons & Dragons should know how to have.
Bringing Earth Day Home (washingtonpost.com): "Although it is unlikely many of us will spend the day saving a rain forest or preventing the drift of coal-fired power plant emissions, we can make a positive contribution closer to home." The Washington Post offers 10 "simple" actions to reduce your home's environmental impact. More info is available from the EPA. (It's a great concept, but I'm not sure that number 2, "Eliminate lead-based paint," qualifies as simple.)
Mary McGrory, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and, before that, The Washington Star, died April 21, 2004. She was 85.
CNN.com - Study: Chocolate, BBQ addiction may be real - Apr 21, 2004
A brain scan study of normal, hungry people showed their brains lit up when they saw and smelled their favorite foods in much the same way as the brains of cocaine addicts when they think about their next snort.
Among the most exotic of Einstein’s predictions was that massive bodies — planets, stars or black holes —actually twist time and space around as they spin, much like the winds of a tornado. Other tenets of general relativity have been tested, such as the warping of time and space by massive bodies, but the twisting effect, known as frame dragging, has never been put to the test, scientists said. If Einstein is right, scientists say, the satellite should detect that small bits of time and space are actually missing from each orbit, something indiscernible to orbiting astronauts but measurable nonetheless.
In a First for Mammals, Mice Are Created Without Fathers (washingtonpost.com)
Lacking any paternal genes, all the mice born this way were females. But they are not clones, because each is a genetically unique animal developed from its own egg.
The feat does not suggest that men will soon become irrelevant for human reproduction. The extreme genetic manipulations used by the team are for now, at least, technically and ethically infeasible in humans.
The experiments produced far more dead and defective baby mice than normal ones.
As a defiant Mordechai Vanunu headed out of prison on Wednesday after 18 years, flashing the victory sign and declaring he was proud of what he had done. Mr. Vanunu, 49, appears to be as widely reviled today as he was in 1986, when he was kidnapped by Israel's intelligence service in Rome after giving a detailed interview on Israel's clandestine nuclear program to The Sunday Times of London.
NPR : Justices Hear Arguments in Guantanamo Detainees Case
The Supreme Court hears arguments in the case of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The detainees have requested a ruling on whether U.S. courts can review challenges to their incarceration. The Bush administration argues foreign prisoners picked up on the battlefield and held outside U.S. borders do not have the right to access the courts. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports.
FT Reviews: Animals & Psychedelics
If even an ant can tell the difference between being straight and high, in this instance by sucking secretions from the abdomen of a lomechusa beetle, what does this tell us about the consciousness of something like a mandrill, which munches the intensely potent iboga root, then waits up to two hours for the effects to kick in before engaging in territorial battle with another mandrill? Equally fascinating is the fact that many animals appear to use psychedelics recreationally — and that not all individuals of a particular species will indulge, just as some humans are more partial to tripping out than others. One in the eye for the stark behaviourists, it would seem.
On April 28, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral arguments in two cases that New York Times reporter David Stout noted are likely to result in rulings of "profound importance, drawing the lines between the powers of courts and the administration and, perhaps, affecting the civil liberties of Americans in ways not yet imagined."
The justices will hear the cases of two American citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, who have been held as "enemy combatants" in Defense Department prisons on American soil indefinitely, incommunicado, without charges, and without the continual Sixth Amendment guarantee of access to a lawyer.
The Village Voice: The Hidden Supreme Court by Nat Hentoff: How many of you can recognize the nine most powerful Americans?
If you're a little high and you just want to look at pretty pictures, you can get fixated on the centerfold and you take out a magnifying glass and look at all those snowy flakes -- that's the resin, that's what gets you stoned. People like to look at that.
High Times At 30, Getting Its Head Together (washingtonpost.com).
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange April/May 2004: April is so exciting in the garden.
A pause that discourages in the development of the On the Road movie.
The Slack Album is a mostly tongue-in-cheek project fusing Jay-Z’s The Black Album to Pavement’s classic lo-fi album Slanted and Enchanted, combining the songs track-by-track in order of the original album sequences. Some of the resultant music is hip-hop-ish; some is not.