I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
WANNA ROLL THE DICE ON THIS TREATMENT, AND THESE STORIES? How much do you bet it will work for you? Both the LA Times and Washington Post pick up on what was doubtless a press release sent out from the American Journal of Psychiatry on a paper released today on the use of the experimental drug nalmefene to disrupt the brain's dopamine system and brain opiate circuits so that many subjects don't get the zing of thrill/pleasure when making a bet. (One of the many addictions my somewhat addictive personality has managed to utterly avoid, fortunately; I've never gambled a penny on anything in my life; still have never even bought a lottery ticket.)
From the LA Times version, which I rate as the better:
In the largest clinical study of its kind, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that daily doses of an experimental drug called nalmefene, often used to treat alcoholism, appeared to curb the craving to gamble.
[...]
"The study is part of emerging evidence that gambling, once thought to be a problem in moral integrity, is instead a problem in brain biology and can be successfully treated," said Dr. Robert Freedman, editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, which published the study today in its February issue.
The study was sponsored by BioTie Therapies Corp., a Finnish biotechnology company that manufactures nalmefene.
The researchers tested the drug in a controlled trial involving 207 people undergoing treatment for compulsive gambling at 15 centers across the United States.
Almost two-thirds of the patients who were given nalmefene showed "significant" improvement during the four months of treatment, while about one-third of the patients in the placebo group responded favorably, the researchers reported.
About a third of the original participants dropped out due to nausea and other side effects.
[...]
"Gambling itself is quite pleasant," Grant said. "It is the fallout — bankruptcy, divorce, jail — that is unpleasant. It is difficult to keep people in treatment."
[...]
Nalmefene interferes with brain opiate circuits that process sensations of pleasure. It also indirectly affects the brain's dopamine system, which handles feelings of reward.
Treated with nalmefene, the patients reported that gambling no longer seemed as thrilling or compelling.
"It is not a magic pill," Grant cautioned. It may be most effective when used in conjunction with traditional counseling and therapy.
To better understand proper dosages, the researchers are conducting a second clinical trial involving 200 patients at 20 treatment centers, he said.
It's unfortunate that a primary way drugs get tested is via sponsorship by the company that created them, since that tends to promote an interest in positive findings, of course, but it's also the way an extremely high percentage of drugs get tested.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5 for either version as interested. Bonus drug story: Inhaled Insulin Wins U.S. Approval. Good news for diabetes sufferers, of course.
Scientists say they have confirmed that a so-called 10th planet discovered last year is bigger than Pluto, but that likely won't quell the debate over what makes a planet.
[...]
By measuring how much heat it radiates, German scientists led by Frank Bertoldi of the University of Bonn estimated that UB313 was about 1,864 miles across. That makes it larger than Pluto, which has a diameter of about 1,429 miles.
"It is now increasingly hard to justify calling Pluto a planet if UB313 is not also given this status," Bertoldi said in a statement.
Based on its enormous distance from the Sun, UB313 is calculated to be tremendously cold: a staggering -248 °C. Bertoldi and his colleagues combined this value with their measurements of UB313's radiation to determine its reflectivity and size.
Although this first estimate of 3,000 kilometres may be out by as much as 400 kilometres, this still puts UB313 well ahead of 2,300-kilometre-wide Pluto in the size stakes, making it the largest body found in the Solar System since the discovery of Neptune in 1846.
The research also shows that UB313 has a reflectivity, or albedo, of about 60%. This is roughly the same as Pluto's, suggesting that the two objects' surfaces are made of very similar materials, such as frozen methane and nitrogen snow. Only a very frosty world could produce an albedo of 60%, says Brown.
For pay, Mike Bushroe analyzes data from Jupiter's largest moon; for fun, he designs solar death rays.
The day job, as senior software engineer for the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer (DISR) on the Huygens space probe that landed on Titan last January, is the second-best job a guy could have, Bushroe said.
His dream job, though, is to join the "MythBusters" team on the Discovery Channel, something he managed to do for a week after he designed a solar "death ray" that Archimedes could have used to set the Roman fleet afire during the siege of Syracuse in 213 B.C.
Bushroe's design came in response to a challenge issued by the show to its viewers: Design a full- or reduced-scale model of a device allegedly used to focus enough sunlight on the invading Roman fleet to set it afire.
[...]
Bushroe figured he would need 240 soldiers, represented by wooden posts arrayed on six levels, each with a 1-by-3-inch polished-brass shield.
For the full-scale model, Bushroe said he "couldn't afford a giant bronze mirror. I did a modern material substitution of sheet metal on plywood."
He used a silver coating to give the metal a reflective surface after discovering that the Romans used similar techniques in antiquity.
Bushroe spent 12 to 14 hours a day on the project and took two weeks' vacation to complete it. It was worth it, he said. "It's been a really exciting ride."
Did it work? Stop reading if you plan to watch.
No, really, stop.
Bushroe can't answer that question because of a nondisclosure agreement he signed, but reports published during the filming of the show indicate that none of the devices tested by "MythBusters" lived up to the name "death ray."
Awwwwww. I really want an Ancient Greek Death Ray. I need to complete my set.
Evidence is mounting that certain stars get kicked free from the gravitational pull at the center of the galaxy - rocketing outward into intergalactic space at breakneck speeds.
The latest sighting of two such "hypervelocity stars" - bringing the grand total to five over the past year - suggests that these Milky Way escapees are not bizarre oddities. Rather, they give an indication of conditions and processes that exist at the center of the galaxy, a place that can be difficult for astronomers to see.
The discovery of the two newest hypervelocity stars was no accident. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the first to go looking for stellar speedsters, say the duo are zooming away from the center of the Milky Way at up to 1.43 million miles per hour. At that pace, an object would cover the distance between the Earth and the moon in about 10 minutes - fast enough to allow a star to escape the galaxy's gravitational grip.
The same team reported finding the first of these objects last February, and since then theories attempting to explain their travel patterns have multiplied like rabbits.
"The first one was just sort of an odd object - you know: 'Look at this! Wow!' " says Warren Brown, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who stumbled across last year's hypervelocity star. "But now we have a sample of five, so it starts to get interesting. They come from the galactic center and are ejected by the supermassive black hole there. So they tell a story of what's happening at the galactic center."
To find these stars, astronomers hunt for them in the Milky Way's halo - a spherical region around the galaxy.
[...]
By tracking the travels of hypervelocity stars, astronomers hope to determine the distribution of the galaxy's dark matter, as well as trace the shape of the galaxy's gravitational field, adds Margaret Geller, a member of the team hunting the "hypers."
The galaxy's halo is home to other fast-moving stars, typically kicked out of the plane of the galaxy by interactions with other objects. But these "runaway" stars fail to reach the velocities needed to flee the galaxy entirely.
[...]
The tale behind hypervelocity stars begins in 1988, when Jack Hills, a theorist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, calculated that under the right conditions a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way could eject stars in its immediate vicinity at speeds up to nearly 9 million m.p.h.
Over the years, other scientists toyed with the concept, trying to devise scenarios to identify the configurations of stars and black holes that could give a star the kick it would need to exit the galaxy.
One approach, for example, holds that a hypervelocity star comes from a tightly bound pair of stars drawn toward the galaxy's central black hole. As this binary star gets too close, the black hole's gravity rips the two apart, consuming one of them. The sudden release frees the second star from the black hole's clutches - and sends it packing.
Last February, Dr. Brown and his colleagues reported finding the first hypervelocity star while searching for star "streams" in the halo that would testify to past mergers between the Milky Way and other galaxies.
Hypervelocity stars give themselves away by their age and composition, which are more akin to stars in the center of the galaxy than to those in the halo, as well as by their speed and direction.
Then, in November and December, two separate groups of European astronomers published their detections of another hypervelocity star each. One appears to have come from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. If that's its true source, the star could testify to the presence of a supermassive black hole in the LMC.
The two latest hypervelocity stars, however, clearly came from the Milky Way, Brown says. The team used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as the starting point for its hypervelocity star search.
Once candidates are found, the team uses the Smithsonian's 6.5-meter telescope on Mt. Hopkins in Arizona to make detailed measurements of their compositions and velocities.
Hypervelocity stars are thought to be rare - some scientists estimate that only about 1,000 exist in the vast space the halo occupies. But that view could change if searches using more powerful telescopes expand to include more types of stars than the extremely hot blue stars astronomers have been looking for so far.
Blue stars, while very faint, are the easiest to spot at the distances involved. And because they are relatively young, they provide the biggest age contrast with the halo's stellar geezers.
My bet is, like, galactic scale warfare, and aliens, like, hurtlin' stars at each other and stuff! I betcha! I betcha!
Prove it isn't so!
Elsewhere: who doesn't like some good monkey porn? Okay, don't answer that. Please. But monkeys do (male monkeys, anyway; I'd like to see a comparable study with female monkes, as well):
Would you pay to see a monkey's backside? I hope not. Monkeys will, and I guess that's okay, though it sounds awfully close to the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human realm.
A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.
The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine.
The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets more interesting.
The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys.
Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.
"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation -- by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.
Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment.
[...]
The study, announced Friday, is far from monkey business. It was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Cure Autism Now Foundation. The goal is to learn more about the social machinery of the brain with an eye toward helping autism patients.
"One of the main problems in people with autism is that they don't find it very motivating to look at other individuals," Platt said. "And even when they do, they can't seem to assess information about that individual's importance, intentions or expressions."
The monkeys provide "an excellent model for how social motivation for looking is processed in normal individuals," Platt said. "And, it's a model that we can use to explore the neurophysiological mechanisms of those motivations in a way we can't do in humans. For example, we can use drugs that affect specific neural processes to explore whether we can mimic some of the deficits found in autism in these animals."
At 23, she held a very high rank in her group of 80 and had all the companionship she needed in her daughter Sierra.
Then one day in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, Sierra was killed by a lion.
Sylvia had simultaneously lost her best friend and grooming partner, and her glucocorticoid stress hormone levels went through the roof.
"Sylvia's stress hormone levels tripled from what they were before Sierra died," Anne Engh of the University of Pennsylvania told LiveScience.
Stressed out and stuck in a depressive, lonely funk, Sylvia the baboon, previously considered the "queen of mean" among her troop, reached out to other baboons for comfort.
"Without Sierra, Sylvia really had nobody else," Engh said. "So great was her need for social bonding that Sylvia began grooming with a female of much lower status, behavior that would otherwise be beneath her."
After a month of grooming and hanging out with her new friends, Sylvia's hormone levels returned to normal. Grooming, the friendly cleaning of each other's fur, is the primary way baboons strengthen social bonds.
The leading cause of death in adult baboons is predation, usually from leopards and lions. Although close friends and relatives of the deceased individual exhibit the highest levels of stress after a killing, the rest of the group feels it too. Increased grooming and interaction is a good way for them to return to normal.
"Like humans, baboons seem to rely on friendly relationships to help them cope with stressful situations," Engh said.
However, while humans actually miss deceased friends, baboons like Sylvia might actually be more stressed about the loss of physical contact with other monkeys and not being clean.
"It could be less that they miss their friends and more of a physiological response to a lack of physical contact and grooming," Engh said.
This study, announced today, is detailed online by the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences.
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