Stephan: In light of what is happening in the U.S. I thought this essay very apposite.
Earlier this week, Charles Lane wrote an impassioned defense of the National Security Administration in the Washington Post, taking on German critics who had likened the agency’s newly disclosed surveillance practices – Spiegel reported in late June that American intelligence services were monitoring some 500 million electronic and telephone communications each month – to those of the old East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. Lane derided the claim of Spiegel columnist Jakob Augstein that ‘no matter in what system or to what purpose, a monitored human being is not a free human being.
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FRANK NEWPORT, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: This is the result of the creation of the American Gulag, the privatization of prisons and schools, and the war on drugs. All of the companies, and agencies involved in these depraved activities make their ricebowl through a deliberate institutionalized social policy of using the poor first, and Black young men by preference, as valves to tap into the public money trough. This whole structure is based on racist principles, as the fully documented social outcomes make irrefutably clear.
PRINCETON, NJ — While 68% of blacks say the American justice system is biased against blacks, 25% of whites agree. Blacks’ attitudes about the justice system have remained virtually constant over the past 20 years, but whites have become less likely to perceive bias.
Trend: Do you think the American justice system is biased against black people?
The new results are based on interviews with 2,541 Americans, including 1,841 non-Hispanic whites and 230 non-Hispanic blacks, conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking July 16-21, after the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial was handed down. Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the shooting death of a young black man, Trayvon Martin.
The Gallup data reveal a continuing divide by race in views of the fairness of the American justice system. This current divergence by race in views of bias in the justice system is broadly similar to attitudes measured in Gallup surveys conducted in 1993 and in 2008, although the percentage of white Americans who say the justice system is biased has dropped by eight percentage points over that time, while the percentage of blacks has stayed constant.
Blacks Say Zimmerman Verdict Was Wrong
These black-white differences regarding the […]
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TIA GHOSE, Staff Writer -
Stephan: This may be a breakthrough that a few years from now may affect our lives.
Hold on to your wand, Harry Potter: Science has outdone even your best ‘Leviosa!’ levitation spell.
Researchers report that they have levitated objects with sound waves, and moved those objects around in midair, according to a new study.
Scientists have used sound waves to suspend objects in midair for decades, but the new method, described today (July 15) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, goes a step further by allowing people to manipulate suspended objects without touching them.
This levitation technique could help create ultrapure chemical mixtures, without contamination, which could be useful for making stem cells or other biological materials.
Parlor trick
For more than a century, scientists have proposed the idea of using the pressure of sound waves to make objects float in the air. As sound waves travel, they produce changes in the air pressure - squishing some air molecules together and pushing others apart.
By placing an object at a certain point within a sound wave, it’s possible to perfectly counteract the force of gravity with the force exerted by the sound wave, allowing an object to float in that spot.
In previous work on levitation systems, researchers had used transducers to produce sound waves, and reflectors to […]
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TERRELL JOHNSON, - The Weather Channel
Stephan: Here is more on what is happening in the Arctic. It is not good news.
Rapidly rising temperatures already have had an ‘amazing and potentially troubling’ impact in the Arctic, a group of scientists reported in June after a year-long mission to study how global warming is changing the vast ice- and permafrost-covered region that surrounds the North Pole.
The NASA-sponsored mission, called CARVE — an acronym for ‘Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment’ — uses a specially-outfitted plane that flies low and slow above the pristine wilderness of Alaska’s North Slope and the Yukon River Valley, allowing it to measure the interaction of greenhouse gases between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere.
After its first three flights for 2013 (of a planned seven) concluded in June, the study already had its members re-thinking how quickly the Arctic’s permafrost is melting and what that might mean for the carbon stored deep in its frozen soil and sediments.
‘Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures — as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in just the past 30 years,’ the mission’s principal investigator, Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview.
‘As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as […]
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JOSEPH ROMM, - The Energy Collective
Stephan: And yet more on what is happening in the far North. We are ignoring this all at our peril, but I don't expect anything to be done.
In 2011, scientists explained that the Greenland Ice Sheet ‘could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming
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