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Tuesday, April 22, 2003
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Dirk Laureyssens writes: Now in our daily life we see a number of phenomena which 'resemble' to processes of pelastration or similar, such as the human procreation, but also in biological systems. Micro-cosmic systems resemble macro-cosmic systems. Maybe some mathematicians trapped in the uni-dimensional view of the string theory and in some views like the Calabi-Yau space in the Branes theory or the Ekpyrotic universe will find here some teasing alternative aspects. In fact you might say that the two separate wands of the Ekpyrotic universe are our two tube wands (which would add the real key to Burt Ovrut and his team). And also people who like the Holomovement of Bohm and Hiley will find here the undivided and unbroken wholeness. Bohm describes the Implicate Order of the Bohm formulation in terms of Lie Sphere Geometry as describing trajectories "... as a kind of enfolded geometric structure whose meaning can be seen all at once as a 'chain' of successively contacting spheres. (04/22/03) | |
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David Remnick writes: There is little doubt that some of the most hawkish ideologues in and around the Bush Administration entertain dreams of a kind of endless war. James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence who has been proposed as a Minister of Information in Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld, forecasts a Fourth World War (the third, of course, having been the Cold War), which will last “considerably longer” than either of the first two. One senior British official dryly told Newsweek before the invasion, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” And then, presumably, to Damascus, Beirut, Khartoum, Sanaa, Pyongyang. Richard Perle, one of the most influential advisers to the Pentagon, told an audience not long ago that, with a successful invasion of Iraq, “we could deliver a short message, a two-word message: ‘You’re next.’” The Middle East is rife with regimes that support, each in its own way, dangerous and destabilizing terrorist groups, from Hezbollah to Al Qaeda. A stable, independent, and free Iraq—which will take years to achieve—might well exert a powerful influence. But if the invasion of Iraq emboldens American ideologues to the point of triumphalism and hubris, to the point where every world-transforming fantasy is to be proposed and indulged without brake, then those whose historical analogy of choice was 1914 could prove to be possessed not only of a tragic view of life but also of a terrifyingly convincing argument. The moral and political critics of a war in Iraq were surely correct to say that the worst consequence, beyond the thousands of lives lost, was the erosion of our relations with many of our allies and their publics. There is hypocrisy everywhere (Russia’s lectures on the exercise of American power seem hollow after the devastation of Chechnya), but it is long past the moment for debate, even with the French. The future is what counts. Some liberal internationalists, having seen the use of force come to a decent end in Kosovo and (finally) in Bosnia, supported this war. But among them, as among the opponents of the war, there has been a profound sense of anxiety that the Administration was recklessly indifferent to the imperfect but irreplaceable structures of international order built over sixty years. (04/22/03) | |
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Financial Times: Iraq -- The director general said he was confused by the lack of any formal notices, and had a only a vague idea of the committee, backed by the Iraqi National Congress, the formerly exiled opposition group. "I don't honestly know who they are, who chose them, how they are being motivated. I know I am in contact with no one and no one is in contact with me." However, he lamented the whole US approach to dealing with post-war Iraq. "We have a lot of experience with coups d'etat and this one is the worst," he said. "Any colonel in the Iraqi army will tell you that when he does a coup he goes to the broadcasting station with five announcements. "The first one is long live this, down with that. The second one is your new government is this and that. The third is the list of the people to go on retirement. The fourth one, every other official is to report back to work tomorrow morning. The fifth is the curfew." This is usually done within one hour, he added. "Now we are waiting more than a week and still we hear nothing from them." (04/22/03) | |
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New York Times -- WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, south of Baghdad, Iraq, April 20 — A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said. They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs. The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said. The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants. (04/22/03) | |
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The Tehran Times -- Cracks threatening to break up a massive glacier atop the Peruvian Andes have caught the attention of a NASA satellite, which has begun keep watch for any signs of what could be a catastrophic meltdown, the U.S. space agency said in a statement Monday. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working with Peruvian government officials and geologists to monitor the glacier, which feeds Lake Palcacocha, high above the town of Huaraz, 170 miles (270 kilometers) north of Lima, it said. If a large chunk were to break off the glacier and fall into the lake, officials fear the splash would create a flood that would send water raging through the town of 60,000 people in less than 15 minutes, AFP reported. (04/22/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- The most ambitious environmental rescue operation ever tried in this country — a $7.8 billion plan to restore the Everglades — is suddenly at risk. The reason is that one of the major players in the enterprise, Florida's politically connected sugar cane industry, wants to postpone into the distant future the deadline for cleaning up the polluted water flowing into the Everglades. And the Florida Legislature is poised to let the industry do it. This could mean serious trouble for an already fragile ecosystem. It would also violate the spirit of the federal-state partnership underlying the project and threaten the revenue stream on which it depends. The project is the result of 15 years of bipartisan negotiation, with costs to be shared equally by the state and federal governments. In essence, it's a vast replumbing scheme aimed at rerouting one trillion gallons of Florida's copious rainwater to the Everglades, which desperately needs it. But fancy engineering will mean nothing unless the water itself is clean. The main culprit is phosphorous, which flows from the farms and sugar cane fields north of the Everglades, and which 15 years ago topped out at more than 300 parts per billion — 30 times the maximum amount that scientists said the Everglades could handle. After much debate, the growers and other parties agreed to reduce that level to 10 parts per billion by 2006. Great strides have been made. But with the goal in sight, Big Sugar now wants to weaken the standard to a biologically unacceptable 15 parts per billion and delay the compliance deadline 20 years. A bill written by a sugar loyalist named Joe Spratt codifying these wishes is now sailing through Florida's House. (04/22/03) | |
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New Scientist -- A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week. The project's home page says that in the last 24 hours over 36 million web pages have been catalogued by Grub software installed by users on about 1000 personal computers around the globe. Like SETI at home and other distributed computing projects, Grub runs in the background on a computer's spare capacity. It automatically trawls the web and collects details on thousands of pages per hour and returns this information to a central database. The Grub screen saver that displays the websites the program is scouring. LookSmart, the US company behind Grub hopes that eventually the project could provide enough raw data to keep a comprehensive search engine up-to-date. The company believes the distributed service has the potential to one day rival Google, the web's most popular search service. (04/22/03) | |
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New York Times: National -- At a time when the governor of Missouri has ordered every third light bulb unscrewed to save money, when teachers are doubling as janitors in Oklahoma and working two weeks without pay in Oregon, when Connecticut is laying off prosecutors and Kentucky is releasing prison inmates early, the veterinarian crisis in Nebraska may seem like small potatoes. Nebraska has dismissed two of its three state diagnostic veterinarians, meaning a rancher with a sick cow in Scottsbluff now has to drive the length of the state to see what's up with Nellie. That cutback, the state equivalent of rooting for coins in a car ashtray, is a prime example of how far the pain of anemic state treasuries has spread — and not only in Nebraska, a state where almost 25,000 poor mothers have lost health care and where state college tuition has been raised 20 percent over two years. Ranchers here have joined a chorus of wounded constituents pleading with state politicians to restore spending. From Lincoln to Honolulu, the reply has been the same: the till is empty. The states are desperate, struggling with their worst financial crises since World War II. They have tapped rainy day funds, raided tobacco money that was supposed to have provided health care for children and taxed every possible vice. Last year brought the storm warnings: some layoffs, the inconveniences of libraries closing early and roads without fresh asphalt. Now, as states scramble to find ways to cut nearly $100 billion this year and next from budgets that must by law be balanced, the cuts are much larger, and their effects profound. (04/22/03) | |
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New Scientist -- DNA from the animals and plants that populated Siberia and Alaska up to 395,000 years ago has been recovered from specks of permafrost. The discovery of these genetic fragments - by far the oldest DNA sequences yet authenticated - will give scientists unprecedented power to reconstruct ancient ecosystems and track them through time. The work has already shed new light on the mysterious extinction of the region's large mammals. Eske Willerslev and his team at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark sampled permafrost along 1200 kilometres of Siberia's Arctic coast. They drilled to depths of 31 metres, removed cores of soil, and then extracted any DNA remaining in the frozen earth. The researchers looked for segments of several vertebrate mitochondrial genes and a plant chloroplast gene, which vary slightly between different species. What they found greatly exceeded their expectations. (04/22/03) | |
6:01:12 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
5/1/2003; 8:14:19 AM.
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