mtanga

The above representation of the universe within 100 million light years of Earth can be viewed clearly on this very interesting, interactive site. It allows the user to zoom in and out, providing some perspective to otherwise unimaginably big numbers and distances.

Be patient; you have to get to around the two minute mark to begin to appreciate it.

"It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park."

Green Communications has some background on Moran, in which he is described as, among other things, "a tall, rotund prankster with a flowing white beard..."

Here's an exceptionally useful, and unbelievably thorough list of phone numbers and prompts which will allow you to efficiently find a real, live person. It's even sorted by categories!

Frustrated with people and politicians who refuse to listen or learn, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield ends his 34-year government career today in search of a new platform for getting out his unwelcome message: Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared with the big one yet to come.

Mayfield, 58, leaves his high-profile job with the National Weather Service more convinced than ever that U.S. residents of the Southeast are risking unprecedented tragedy by continuing to build vulnerable homes in the tropical storm zone and failing to plan escape routes.

"We're eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster," he said. "I know people don't want to hear this, and I'm generally a very positive person, but we're setting ourselves up for this major disaster."

More than 1,300 deaths across the Gulf Coast were attributed to Hurricane Katrina, the worst human toll from a weather event in the United States since the 1920s.

But Mayfield warns that 10 times as many fatalities could occur in what he sees as an inevitable strike by a huge storm during the current highly active hurricane cycle, which is expected to last another 10 to 20 years.

I rarely attend Broadway productions, but that doesn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying Wolcott's occasional reviews. And while he does provide interesting insights into the plays, it's usually the asides – like this one – which I enjoy most:

I caught it last week at a matinee, and before I say anything about the play I want to address something to the tourists in Times Square traveling in clumps: Don't block the walkways and ask if I'd mind taking a picture of you with your "group." Yes, I mind. Outta the way. Move.

Birds living in cities are performing a type of "avian rap" while their rural counterparts are sticking to more traditional sounds, a study shows.

Dutch researchers found that urban species of birds sing short, fast songs rather than the slower melodies of countryside birds.

Experts said city birds have adapted to counter background noise and increase their chances of finding a mate.

Rap? Not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when contemplating the songs that birds sing. But we're not talking about just any birds here: we're talkin' urban birds! And they're even sampling:

The study even gives the example of one Rotterdam great tit attempting a 16-note song, possibly copied from a blue tit.

It is, of course, very easy to praise Bill and Melinda Gates for having created a foundation which is giving away huge sums of money (much of it theirs) in an effort to stamp out disease in many of the poorest countries in the world. But as my father pointed out to me just the other day, the Gates' strategy is actually a questionable one, as it will have the effect of contributing to the even bigger problem of overpopulation.

Don Robertson goes further, and emphasizes another very interesting and, in my view, compelling flaw in the Gates' approach:

Empirical science, the great feeder of these masses, as it piles its waste and dangerous inventions to the rafters is also the biggest gambling addict on the planet, continually wagering the future of mankind hoping to win scientific praise for being first, or at least for being the most thoroughly profitable, as was the case with MicroSoft Corporation. But, the current leader, the medical ventures empirical game funded by government and not uncoincidentally the Foundation are some of the worst of a myriad of humanity's future-gambling, empirical morality offenders on the planet.

I have addressed the problems with the empirical science of medicine already in an article entitled, A Challenge to Medical Ethics. I offer a brief summation of those arguments thus: Medical science and practice gambles the future of humanity with a wholesale disregard of the moral consequence of every such a gamble.

The Foundation's efforts, fed and misguided by an immorally reckless secular humanism has grub-staked the medical end of humanity's future-gambling empiricists to the tune of billions of dollars with a feel-good-about-it reckless abandon inappropriately given towards the consequences of either medicine's success or failure in eradicating malaria, tuberculosis and either curing or creating vaccinating technologies for HIV-AIDS, three of the main goals of the Foundation. These goals are being striven for regardless of the intrinsic dangers inherent to the development of these medical technologies and their unintended byproducts.

Here, Bill and Melinda have not thought through the answer to that question, and they have instead left it a rhetorical statement of their mission.

If you step back though, take a deep breath, and consider what it is the Foundation is up to, it sounds so much like the prologue to an episode of Star Trek. It is easy to envision the resulting problems this well-groomed and tightly uniformed spaceship crew will encounter in this one-hour fantasy voyage.

First of all, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS have their highest concentrations in South and South East Asia, Africa, and, Central and South America, what are generally the most overly populated and under developed regions of the world. These diseases exist there because there is a niche for them within these highly populated masses living as they will on the edge of possible sustenance for the size of their populations. If this pathogen niche is vacated by the efforts of the Foundation, it will no doubt be filled by other pathogens, because no vacant niche in nature exists for long without being filled.

The effect of rising populations caused by effecting even a partial remedy would accelerate the filling of this pathogenic void by something else. More likely however, as the history of medical triumphs shows, there isn't likely to be a cure created in any case, but instead a series of temporary fixes in an escalating war on these pathogens, temporary fixes that will produce within these pathogens a mutational counter offensive that will eventually make them all the more virulent and even more deadly. When attacked, pathogens generally mutate towards more deadliness in human populations in part because this deadliness is what eventually closes the niche-opportunity provided by a temporary absence of the mediated pathogen.

In the mean time, the Foundation will have spent tens of billions of dollars in the medical industry, an industry whose dangerously future-gambling empirical techniques and technologies are presently coming into view as a wholesale net negative inflicted upon the greater human condition. Medicine as it is practiced is not ethical on its own terms, let alone moral under the brightly illuminating light of the moral imperative of life.

Simply put, medicine as it is being practiced is far more likely to either kill off humanity or make life immensely more miserable in these regions, than it is likely to cure these diseases.

So you see, Bill and Melinda Gates' dream of tropical paradises where disease has been eradicated generally cannot be realized without tackling the much bigger issues of over population and the misuse of, and deification of technology, food production technologies that cause over population, but also especially medical technologies that chase pathogens into ever greater virulence.

A fine, decent man, blah, blah, blah...enough already! Here's the best antidote I've seen, featuring the superb Dana Carvey (as Tom Brokaw):

Maadhu Krishnan, a three-year-old from Sunnyvale, California, is rather precocious (not to mention cute). In the above clip, he impressively fires off the capitals of all fifty states (though does stumble on Kentucky).

Hmmm...I wonder if any of the Las Vegas casinos offer future book (ante-post to you Brits) wagering on the 2015 National Spelling Bee? (via Neatorama)

Most of us were introduced to the Moken last winter, when there was a brief flurry of stories on how the “sea gypsies” of Thailand and Myanmar managed to escape the tsunami by reading the language of the ocean—a language exceedingly familiar to a people who spend all of their lives in or very close to the water. It was a heartening tale, in a context where those kinds of tales were hard to come by, and it gained intrigue from the other tidbits we learned about this remote tribe: how their four-year-olds can swim in waters 20 feet deep and adults can dive to 200 feet (most of us conk out by 30 feet); how throughout most of history they lived on boats, coming in to terra firma for only a few months each year; how Moken children have learned to constrict their pupils to see 50 percent better under water than we can, enabling them to go harpooning without goggles and find tiny shells on the ocean floor.

All of which is true, and amazing. But there’s one more story that, perhaps, we should also have heard: how the Moken have been struggling to maintain their lives and livelihoods in a world that claims to admire them but has little room for their expansive relationship with the natural universe.

A dog's colour reflects a pooch's personality, scientists say, at least in one breed, the English cocker spaniel.

The latest study, recently published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, shows that golden/red English cocker spaniels exhibit the most dominant and aggressive behaviour.

Black dogs in this breed are the second most aggressive, while particolour (white with patches of colour) are more mild-mannered.

Earlier research suggests that hair colour is also linked to behaviour in labrador retrievers.

For this breed, the most aggressive are the yellow ones, the next most aggressive are the black dogs and the least aggressive are the chocolate coloured ones.

The behaviour-hair colour connection is likely due to related genetic coding that takes place during the pup's earliest life stages, according to lead author Dr Joaquín Pérez-Guisado.

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.

• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat.

• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

Morgan Meis, a regular contributor to the always excellent Three Quarks Daily, has written a fine essay on Katrina, and the devastation which "she" left in her wake. Here's a small taste:

The hurricane won. In the course of a few hours it reduced generations of human activity to so much detritus floating in the filthy waters that breached the levees. But in doing so it also revealed a truth, which is that the richness of intentional spaces always contain the seeds of collapse and decay. It is melancholy to reflect that every facet of the urban landscape is also a ruin in potential. But it is no less true for being so.

Let's take a brief break from the serious, and all too often depressing world of politics. Here's a video done by the comedian/musician Mike O'Connell, with brilliant support from Dr. Ken. It is, among other things, a parody of a certain currently popular musical genre. But most of all, it's hilarious.

Oh, and it is also rather profane, so you should probably skip it if you're sensitive to foul language.

In this case, from New York's JFK International Airport to his hotel in Manhattan.

“Alcohol and drugs tend to keep you from taking walks,” he said while in New York. “Or at least walks of the right kind,” and he added that walking made him feel better than drugs ever had. “But I’m not addicted,” he said. “I don’t need to score a walk.”

By Mr. Self’s usual standards, the walk from Kennedy to Manhattan, about 20 miles, is a mere stroll. What recommended it was that it would take him through parts of the city that most people never notice while driving in a car: an experience that Mr. Self, a student of psycho-geography, believes has imposed a “windscreen-based virtuality” on travel, cutting us off from experiencing our own topography.

“People don’t know where they are anymore, “ he said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

While I generally try to avoid sensational news stories, I have paid some attention to the aftermath of the recent racist outburst by Michael Richards (aka Kramer on the TV show Seinfeld). If you haven't seen the original clip of Richard's public meltdown, you can do so here (be forewarned: it's very unpleasant):

The reason for this post, however, is to provide a related clip which features a comedian named Danny Hoch. It's a fascinating commentary on the insulated Hollywood culture which may, to an extent, have, facilitated Richards' insensitivity.

Hat tip to Dennis at Red State Son