Moving plates, earthquake zones

Sources here and here.

Haiti: Some saw it coming

Le Matin, 15 September 2008 (translation):

Haiti menaced by natural catastrophe: Seismic risk high in Port-au-Prince

The question of the seismic threat to Port-au-Prince is a hot topic. It has been debated in recent days by many people, including high-ranking intellectuals. The conclusions are unanimous: PAP risks being transformed overnight into rubble after a violent quake. 'For two centuries, no major earthquake has been recorded in the Haitian capital. The amount of energy accumulated along the fault runs the risk of an earthquake of 7.2 on the Richter scale. Better not even to talk about it, there's no need to panic. But it would be a catastrophe,' said the chief of the Bureau of Mines and Energy.

h/t Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish.

Image source here.

Asteroid flyby today

Earth to Get Close Shave Wednesday From Newly Discovered Asteroid

Wired: An asteroid 30 to 50 feet across will pass by the Earth at just more than one-third the distance between the Earth and the moon on Wednesday. That's the closest near-Earth object approach currently known between now and the flyby in 2024 of a similar-size object known as 2007 XB23.

The new asteroid, called 2010 AL30, was discovered by the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research program, and announced Monday by the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

The short amount of time between the spotting of the object and its near intersection with Earth is a good reminder that humans don't know every object that could come hurtling out of space and collide with our planet.

'Visitors frequently ask me if I worry about the NEOs that I measure," wrote Dr. P. Clay Sherrod of the Arkansas Sky Observatories, on a forum thread discussing the asteroid. "My response: I don't worry about those that we keep up with... I am more concerned about the ones we never see coming.'

To see how close the asteroid will get, check out this animation of the asteroid's Earth approach (.avi) by Gerhard Dangl, an Austrian astronomer.

Image source here.

'We don't like feeling responsible'

Gabor Maté, M.D.: There is a new and rapidly growing science that focuses on how life experiences influence the function of genes. It's called epigenetics. As a result of life events, chemicals attach themselves to DNA and direct gene activities... Epigenetic effects are most powerful during early development and have now been shown to be transmittable from one generation to the next, without any change in the genes themselves. Environmentally induced epigenetic influences powerfully modulate genetic ones...

Why, then, are narrow genetic assumptions so widely accepted?... There is a psychological fact that, I believe, provides a powerful incentive for people to cling to genetic theories. We human beings don't like feeling responsible: as individuals for our own actions; as parents for our children's hurts; or as a society for our many failings. Genetics -- that neutral, impassive, impersonal handmaiden of Nature -- would absolve us of responsibility and of its ominous shadow, guilt. If genetics ruled our fate, we would not need to blame ourselves or anyone else. Genetic explanations take us off the hook. The possibility does not occur to us that we can accept or assign responsibility without taking on the useless baggage of guilt or blame.

More daunting for those who hope for scientific and social progress, the genetic argument is easily used to justify all kinds of inequalities and injustices that are otherwise hard to defend. It serves a deeply conservative function: if a phenomenon like addiction is determined mostly by biological heredity, we are spared from having to look at how our social environment supports, or does not support, the parents of young children; at how social attitudes, prejudices and policies burden, stress and exclude certain segments of the population and thereby increase their propensity for addiction. The writer Louis Menand said it well in a New Yorker article: 'It's all in the genes:' an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are.'

-- from In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

GMOs cause organ damage

Three Approved GMOs Linked to Organ Damage

Truthout: In What is being described as the first ever and most comprehensive study of the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers have linked organ damage with consumption of Monsanto's GM maize. All three varieties of GM corn -- Mon 810, Mon 863 and NK 603 -- were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities...

The data 'clearly underlines adverse impacts on kidneys and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, as well as different levels of damages to heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system,' reported Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen...

Their December 2009 study appears in the International Journal of Biological Sciences (IJBS). This latest study conforms with a 2007 analysis (.pdf) by CRIIGEN on Mon 863, published in Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, using the same data...

Chronic problems are rarely discovered in 90 days; most often such tests run for up to two years. Tests 'lasting longer than three months give more chances to reveal metabolic, nervous, immune, hormonal or cancer diseases,' wrote Séralini, et al... The researchers conclude that the raw data from all three GMO studies reveal novel pesticide residues will be present in food and feed and may pose grave health risks to those consuming them.

They have called for 'an immediate ban on the import and cultivation of these GMOs and strongly recommend additional long-term (up to two years) and multi-generational animal feeding studies on at least three species to provide true scientifically valid data on the acute and chronic toxic effects of GM crops, feed and foods...

Ecological effects are also in play. Ninety-nine percent of GMO crops either tolerate or produce insecticide. This may be the reason we see bee colony collapse disorder and massive butterfly deaths. If GMOs are wiping out Earth's pollinators, they are far more disastrous than the threat they pose to humans and other mammals.

Further reading:

Health Risks of GM foods, Jeffrey M. Smith.

Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops, Union of Concerned Scientists.

Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years, The Organic Center.

Image source here.

One year in 90 seconds

This is a screenshot. For the video, go here.

Stolen land: Ireland and Israel

Walls never work: in the Middle East or in Ireland

Robert Fisk, in The Independent: The story of the Protestant 'settlements' in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day 'settlements' in the West Bank...

Robert Kee, still one of the finest popular expositors of 16th-17th century Irish history puts it concisely: [six counties, now 'Northern Ireland'] became subject to the most systematic attempt to plant or settle in Ireland strangers from England and Scotland. This was the so-called Plantation of Ulster'...

There had been previous efforts to colonize barbarous Ireland... 'But all such previous plantations had in the end been failures,' writes Kee. 'Collapsing for lack of human support or capital, or else being physically wiped out by the rebellion of those who had been dispossessed to make room for them.'

This remains Israel's fear: that those Palestinians dispossessed in 1948 will return to take their former lands in what is now the State of Israel, or at least those lands stolen from them in the West Bank after 1967... The Elizabethans settlers came as soldiers who settled. Later Scots Protestants came, like Israelis to the West Bank, as settlers prepared to be soldiers...

Cromwell was to inject a new form of violence into Ireland... The slaughter at Drogheda and Wexford acted as a catalyst of mass fear, much as the killings at Deir Yassin and many other Arab villages in 1948 led to the abandonment or capitulation of hundreds of other Arab towns... By 1688, Catholics held only 22 per cent of the original Gaelic Ireland... Arab-owned land in 'Palestine' is now smaller still, heading inexorably to the mere 14 per cent that the Catholics still clung on to in 1703.

Again, these are not parallel narratives, but unborn ghosts are there. On many occasions, acts of 'terrorism' against the Protestants emerged from landless Catholic tenants who were allowed to work for those who had seized their property. So, later Protestant 'settlements' were surrounded by vast defensive walls, angled with watch-towers and ramparts and gun positions...

But the English and Scots 'settlements' failed in Ireland. Protestant hopes of eternal support from London eventually proved false. And so, what of Israeli hopes of eternal support from Washington? I still don't believe in a one-state solution -- which the Protestant minority will one day have to accept in Ireland, if they have not, subconsciously, already done so -- but colonisation leads only to the graveyard. Walls don't work. Nor 'superior' religions. Nor ethnic cleansing. History, which should be studied as eternally as false hopes, is a great punisher.

Image: the Walls of Derry; source here.

Harper's obsession: control and dominance

Authoritarian leaders have four core traits. They are dominating, opposed to equality, committed to their own power, and amoral. They have no compunction about cheating to win, taking advantage of people, or creating false images to sell themselves. In present-day North America they are usually politically and economically conservative.

When a highly authoritarian leader obtains unfettered power, his obsession with control and dominance almost always inflicts widespread damage on his society and its institutions. This is true no matter whether the leader is right-wing or left-wing. -- ferani, in comments at the Toronto Star, referring to the work of Dr. Robert Altemeyer.

Robert Altemeyer is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. His book, The Authoritarians, is available online here.

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies or against despots. What is it? Distrust. -- Demosthenes (384-322 BC)

There are two fairly standard approaches to political power used by those who seek it. Some seek power with the assumption that the citizenry are the source of legitimacy and are to be treated with respect. Others concentrate on identifying whatever insecurities there are in the citizenry and on exploiting them. -- John Ralston Saul

What is hateful is not rebellion but the despotism which induces that rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are they men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitions that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone. -- Wilfred Laurier, in the House of Commons, 1880

'Whether he gets away with it... depends largely on whether the protest spreads'

Two from The Economist:

Harper goes prorogue

Parliamentary scrutiny may be tedious, but democracies cannot afford to dispense with it

Mr Harper's move looks like naked self-interest... Mr Harper is a competent tactician with a ruthless streak. He bars most ministers from talking to the media; he as axed some independent watchdogs; he as binned campaign promises to make government more open and accountable. Now he is subjecting Parliament to prime-ministerial whim. He may be right that most Canadians care more about the luge than the legislature, but that is surely true only while their decent system of government is in good hands. They may soon conclude that it isn't.

Halted in mid-debate

Stephen Harper is counting on Candadians' complacency as he rewrites the rules of his country's politics to weaken legislative scrutiny

He may have miscalculated. A gathering storm of media criticism has extended even to the Calgary Herald, the main newspaper in his political home city, which denounced him for 'a cynical political ploy.'...

Having prorogued Parliament last winter to dodge a confidence vote he seemed set to lost, Mr Harper has now established a precedent that many constitutionalists consider dangerous... The danger in allowing the prime minister to end discussion any time he chooses is that it makes Parliament accountable to him rather than the other way around...

Whether Mr Harper gets away with his innovative use of prime ministerial powers depends largely on whether the protest spreads and can be sustained until Parliament reconvenes in March... He has given the opposition an opportunity. It is now up to it to show that Canada cannot afford a part-time Parliament that sits only at the prime minister's pleasure.

Image source here.

BC least religious place in North America

Which region of North America is most religious? Least?

Vancouver Sun: If anyone ever argues that Canadians are becoming more like the US every week, here is some data that could provide a quick rebuttal... A new poll shows that the least religious states in the United States of America -- Alaska, Oregon, Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts -- are actually more religious than our entire country.

Canada, and especially British Columbia, is in a starkly different religious and cultural world compared to the high-religion US states, which are topped by Mississippi. That financially poor state is followed by more Deep South neighbours, including Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Kentucky.

In Mississippi, the Pew Forum poll found 60 per cent of residents attend a religious institution at least once a week. (The figure doesn't include those who go only twice or thrice a month). The percentage of Canadians who attend a religious institution at least once a week is only 22 per cent. That ties all of Canada with Alaska, which has the absolute lowest attendance rate in the United States.

To emphasize how dramatically different the West Coast of Canada is from Mississippi, reflect on how the rate of weekly attendance in BC is again lower than Canada's national average -- at about 15 per cent...

Go here for a closer look at the fresh US data compiled by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. This subject is also explored in depth in [Douglas Todd's] book Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia -- Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest.

Image: The percentage of people in North America who identify with a religion as opposed to having 'no religion' (1991), (2001); source here.

Shut Parliament, suppress the truth

Grassroots fury greets shuttered Parliament

'GET BACK TO WORK': Thousands on Facebook join constitutional experts to condemn PM's move

Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression

Adapted from War of Illusions.

1. Dummy up. If it's not news, it didn't happen.

2. Wax indignant. Become enraged. Attack.

3. Call the charges 'rumours.' Those who believe them are 'paranoid' or 'hysterical.'

4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up rumours (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.

5. Call the skeptics names. Use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges while praising as 'more reasonable' the government and its defenders. Avoid fair and open debate with those you have maligned.

6. Impugn motives. Marginalize the critics by suggesting that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are only in it for themselves.

7. Invoke authority. Here your stable of pundits and retired officials can be very useful.

8. Dismiss the charges as 'old news.'

9. Come half-clean. This is also known as a 'limited hangout.' Create the impression of candor while you admit only to what is harmless.

10. Characterize the issues as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.

11. Reason backward. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant.

12. Require your critics to come up with the answers to their own questions.

13. Change the subject. Create and/or publicize distractions.

14. Lightly acknowledge incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them.

15. Baldly and brazenly lie. Attribute 'truth' to plausible-sounding but anonymous sources.

16. Expanding on 4 and 5, have your own stooges 'expose' scandals and champion popular causes.

17. Flood online comments forums with your trolls.

Today, dolphins; tomorrow, all the rest

Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

The Times (UK): Dolphins have been declared the world's second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as 'non-human persons.'

Studies into dolphin behavior have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans... These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year...

Dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future... They are 'cultural' animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another... In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks.. After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive...

One study showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognize themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies... In another, captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication... Dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor... [They] co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat... Such observations have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.

Size is only one factor... When it comes to intelligence, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body... The brain cortex of dolphins [has] the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence. Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other...

[Zoologist Lori] Marino and [psychologist Diana] Reiss will present their findings at a conference next month... concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them. Thomas White, professor of ethics... who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference. 'The scientific research... suggests that dolphins are 'non-human persons' who qualify for moral standing as individuals,' he says.

Image source here.

British torture in Ireland

British army accused of 'waterboarding' Irish prisoners in 1970s

AFP: Evidence is emerging that the British army used waterboarding during interrogations on prisoners in Northern Ireland during the Troubles... The technique was allegedly used during at least one interrogation of a prisoner who was found guilty in 1973 of murdering a British soldier, a conviction largely based on an unsigned confession....

The jury did not believe his insistence that he made up the confession only because he had been held down by soldiers who placed a towel over his face and poured water over his nose and mouth to simulate drowning...

The Criminal Cases Review Commission has now referred Liam Holden's case to the Court of Appeals in Belfast after unearthing new evidence and because of doubts about the 'admissibility and reliability' of his confession... 'At trial Mr Holden gave compelling evidence that the alleged confession was obtained by the army using water torture,' his solicitor Patricia Coyle said. 'He spent 17 years in jail. He is looking forward to the court hearing his appeal.'

Guantanamo Bay force feeding raises painful memories

Irelandclick.com, 2006: Such shocking abuses bring back painful memories for New Lodge man Sam Millar. The former republican prisoner -- now a major selling author -- was the longest man on the blanket protest. He said watching the scenes from the horror camp were extremely distressing. 'When I look at what is going on in Guantanamo Bay and compare it with what happened to us, the parallels are frightening.'...

The grim reality of force feeding was described in detail by Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly in an interview with the North Belfast News in 2004. 'They press their knuckles into your jaws and press in hard. The way they finally did force feed me was getting forceps and running them up and down my gums,' he said. 'I opened my mouth, but I was able to resist after that... They they tried -- there's a part of your nose, like a membrane and it's very tender -- and they started on that. It's hard to describe the pain. It's like someone pushing a knitting needle into the side of your eye. As soon as I opened my mouth they put in this wooden bit with a hole in the middle for the tube. They rammed it between my teeth and then tied it with cord around my head... The danger is that every time it happens you think you're going to die. The only things that move are your eyes.'

Image source here.

Quantum of time

Our world may be a giant hologram

New Scientist: The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole... Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface...

The holographic principle radically changes our picture of space-time. Theoretical physicists have long believed that quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton...

So what would it mean if holographic noise has been found? [University of Washington's John] Cramer likens it to the discovery of unexpected noise by an antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964. That noise turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang fireball... 'It confirmed the big bang and opened up a whole field of cosmology.'

[Fermilab physicist Craig] Hogan is more specific. 'Forget Quantum of Solace, we would have directly observed the quantum of time. It's the smallest possible interval of time -- the Planck length divided by the speed of light.'

More importantly, confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity... 'Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory,' [says Hogan]. As serendipitous discoveries go, it's hard to get more ground-breaking than that.

Image source here.