Absolute Horror In Canada

This one is ugly. A man beheaded a fellow passenger on a Canadian Greyhound bus in front of all the other passengers. The victim and attacker were apparently strangers to one another.

BRANDON - Thirty-six passengers of a Greyhound bus travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg Wednesday night watched in horror as a fellow passenger stabbed another man sleeping next to him, eventually decapitating him and waving the man's severed head.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Steve Colwell told reporters this afternon that a 40-year-old man believed to be from out of province is in police custody in connection to the incident.

Despite having been arrested early this morning, the man has not been interviewed by police yet. Colwell wouldn't comment on the circumstances of this.

Police are not releasing any information at all about the attacker or the victim.

Keeping Track Of Time

More information about the Antikythera Mechanism has been revealed. (I first posted about this ancient device here). It turns out that the device could calculate the dates for the Olympics, as well as predict eclipses. All-in-all, this is a pretty sophisticated device. And its some 2,000 years old.

The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, on Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes.

Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.

Here's the website for the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. (The website is under redesign, so everything may not yet be functional.) This will require a little rethinking about how advanced the ancient world really was.

Taking A Victory Lap

I think I detect just a hint of media weariness with Obama's over-sized - and growing - ego. Dana Milbank at the Washington Post reveals a day in the life of the Democratic candidate. It is a somewhat less-than-flattering portrait of a man who is taking a victory lap before winning the big game.

Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally…..

…..The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union. Capitol Police cleared the halls — just as they do for the actual president. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door — just as they do for the actual president.

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions."

This is not a pretty picture of Obama. I imagine that Dana Milbank is about to be uninvited from traveling with the campaign - that is the apparent punishment for media stepping out of line in Obamaland. Do read the whole thing, it really reveals a lot about Obama.

Upgrades - Hopefully Transparent

I logged in tonight and couldn't get on; the server said my CPU quota was exceeded. So I went into the hosting company site and found a bunch of my tables needed repairs. Fixed all that and then upgraded the blogging software. Hopefully, everything is working correctly. If not, leave a comment.

Clear As Glass

It seems that the expression clear as glass doesn't apply to the nature of glass. There is more than a little disagreement over what glass actually is.

"They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids," said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. "They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle."

Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize -winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: "The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition."

He added, "This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade."

Thirteen years later, scientists still disagree, with some vehemence, about the nature of glass.

Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks he essentially solved the glass problem two decades ago based on ideas of what glass would look like if cooled infinitely slowly. "I think we have a very good constructive theory of that these days," Dr. Wolynes said. "Many people tell me this is very contentious. I disagree violently with them."

(I love that quote from Wolynes.) It is a fascinating article. One of the little blurbs that intrigued me was that glass becomes more stable over a (very) long period of time. Sort of like how concrete cures.

Head Over Eels

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long been the go-to source for cutting edge news about eels. Well, OK, we published one post about dead eels two years ago - to the day. But two years after the demise of "Conger Cuddling" in merry old England, a new use has been found for dead eels!

A Japanese firm is turning eels into a soft drink.

The beverage, which translates as "Surging Eel", is a vivid yellow liquid and contains eel extract and vitamins found in the fish.

It has been launched this month to coincide with the start of Japan's annual eel-eating season, which peaks this year on 5 August.

Many believe the fish boost energy during the summer's hot and humid conditions.

Kazunori Hayashi, spokesman for the company Japan Tobacco Inc, which produced the drink, said : "It is mainly for men who are exhausted by the summer's heat".

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Japan Tobacco, Inc. missed a huge opportunity. Had they made the drink with electric eels, they could have had all those vitamins plus 50,000 volts of electricity! Talk about a surging eel!

Sleeping Spa-ing Wid Da Fishes

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been reporting for quite some time on modern breakthroughs in spa treatments and, of course, especially on spa treatments involving animals. (Which cost us a perfectly good informant - we sacrifice for our readers, we do.) In keeping with our tradition of groundbreaking news you can’t lose (even if you want to) here’s today’s animal spa adventure! The flesh-eating fish pedicure!

The toothless fish, termed garra rufa but known as “doctor fish”, nibble away at dead skin while leaving healthy flesh untouched, providing what advocates say is a natural alternative to potentially unsanitary razors, clippers or pumice stones.

John Ho, who owns the salon with wife Yvonne, said he was initially sceptical about offering the technique, which is popular in spas in Turkey, where the fish come from, as well as parts of Japan, China, Singapore and Malaysia.

”I know people were a little intimidated at first,” he told the Associated Press. “But I just said, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ “

But customers flocked to try the treatment and as word spread the salon’s Dr Fish Massage was featured on local radio and Tyra Banks’ television talk show. 

We certainly wish the proprietors all the best. We would caution our readers not to try this at home, especially since we predict that some unscrupulous vendors will now be trying to sell piranha as “(You’re gonna need a) Doctor Fish.”

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been experimenting with our own version of this latest, high-tech beautification technique. We have had limited success with our “lobster pedicure”, however. Although most of the test subjects are now walking again.

Obama Denounces D-Day Landings

From a nearby slightly altered universe:

In a speech today presidential candidate Barack Obama maintained his steadfast disapproval of the D-Day landings of June 6th, 1944, despite the historical evidence of it as a smashing Allied victory over Nazi Germany.

"Even knowing what we know today, I would never commit to Operation Overlord," the Senator explained to a diverse cross section of New York Times reporters and members of NARAL's executive committee. "It should have been obvious from the debacles at Kasserine Pass and the Anzio landings, not to mention the unending quagmire of the Italian campaign as a whole, that simply putting more troops into the European theater was never going to bring the violence to an end."

When asked what his alternative approach would have entailed, Obama responded, "I would have brought the troops home via a 16 month timetable." This was greeted with wild applause. "Peace in our time!" yelled more than one.

At that point an unidentified man in the back of the room pointed out, historically speaking, the entire European war didn't even last a further 12 months after the successful D-Day landings. Obama waived this away by proclaiming the need for, "change! We cannot be bound to the history of dead facts!" Many of the crowd moved towards the unidentified questioner for "further clarification" of his point.

After a short delay for the removal of the corpse, Obama brought the throng to its feet one last time. "This is the reason I have been chosen! This is the reason I am running unopposed for the White House! Because, I would rather lose than admit to being wrong. Facts be damned."

Several NARAL supporters received medical treatment after swooning

What The NYT Didn’t Want You To Read

The New York Times rejected this op-ed from John McCain. Couldn't possibly be bias, could it?

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five "surge" brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his "plan for Iraq." Perhaps that's because he doesn't want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be "very dangerous."

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we've had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the "Mission Accomplished" banner prematurely.

Read the whole thing. If the NYT didn't like it, you should.

Backlash?

Could the fawning coverage of Barack Obama by the majority of the media come back and actually damage Obama in November? It seems possible, judging by the latest Rasmussen poll. They show a clear majority of voters think that the media is trying outright to get Obama elected.

The idea that reporters are trying to help Obama win in November has grown by five percentage points over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey, taken just before the new controversy involving the Times erupted, found that 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help the Democrat with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago.

Just 14% believe most reporters will try to help McCain win, little changed from 13% a month ago. Just one voter in four (24%) believes that most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.

A Rasmussen Reports survey earlier this year found that just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. The paper’s ratings divided sharply along partisan and ideological lines, with liberals far more supportive of the paper than conservatives.

At the time of that survey, the Times was being criticized for an article it had run about McCain’s ties to lobbyists. Sixty-six percent (66%) of those who were aware of the story in question believed it was an attempt by the paper to hurt the McCain campaign.

In the latest survey, a plurality of Democrats—37%– say most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of the campaign. Twenty-seven percent (27%) believe most reporters are trying to help Obama and 21% in Obama’s party think reporters are trying to help the Republican candidate.

Among Republicans, 78% believe reporters are trying to help Obama and 10% see most offering unbiased coverage.

As for unaffiliated voters, 50% see a pro-Obama bias and 21% see unbiased coverage. Just 12% of those not affiliated with either major party believe the reporters are trying to help McCain.

Given the dismal ratings the media have at the moment for trustworthiness, this actually bodes ill for Obama. A lot of people do not like or trust the news media and people tend to judge others by the company they keep. Some of that negative feeling is going to rub off on Obama. The media will do its level best to drag Obama over the finish line, mind you. But it may turn out that they are more of an anchor than an engine.

Edifice Rex

John Fund examines the unseemly rush to use taxpayer money to pay for monuments to living legislators. Charlie Rangel is just the latest example of a politician soliciting funds from businesses with interests before his committee. This has been going on for years. Pols are paying for their self-named edifices with taxpayer money.

Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is intent on raising $30 million for a new academic center in his New York district — a center with his name on it. After securing an earmark and two other federal grants totaling some $2.6 million for the project, the Democratic congressman wrote letters on his congressional stationery to businesses with interests before his committee. They sought meetings to help him fulfill his “personal dream” of seeing the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service completed.

The House Ethics Committee will examine the legality of Mr. Rangel’s requests, but the bigger question is why Congress hands out money to name buildings, bridges — everything under the sun — after its own living members. Until roughly the 1960s, people had to die before a grateful nation memorialized them in granite. The Lincoln Memorial wasn’t dedicated until a full half century after the Great Emancipator’s death. Ditto for Franklin Roosevelt. George Washington had to wait 89 years for his memorial.

Now it seems almost every committee chairman gets some “Monument to Me” named after himself with the tab going to the taxpayer. There’s a navigation lock in Pennsylvania named after Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young, the former GOP chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He represents St. Petersburg, Fla. — his only connection to Pennsylvania is that he happened to be born there. Nor is that Mr. Young’s only monument. The C.W. Young Center for Bio-Defense and Emerging Infectious Disease was dedicated at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., last year.

The real champ at this is Edifice Rex himself, Robert “Porky” Byrd of West Virginia. He has at least three dozen edifices named for him - or for his late wife. Some states are trying to crack down on this, but with only varying degrees of success. Actually, they are mostly unsuccessful.

That’s our money they are glad handing away. If they want a building named for them, they should be paying for it out of their own pockets.

Distracted From Distraction By Distraction

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
(T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, No. 1 of Four Quartets)

A troubling essay in The Sunday Times by Bryan Appleyard should give you pause. Appleyard realized that he was being "Distracted from distraction by distraction" because of the modern technological tools that inundate our daily lives these days. It worried him. Perhaps it should worry you as well.

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

I'd urge you to concentrate and read the whole thing. It is worth it. I suspect there is a lot of truth in what Appleyard has written. There are so very many distractions, busily distracting us from our distractions these days.

One of the reasons posting here has been so light of late is that I am working very long hours every day in a job that requires fierce concentration. When I get home after 12 hours, I have little desire or ability to surf the web trying to find interesting things to discuss. Much of my day is spent fighting the distractions of relentless email and, to a lesser extent, phone calls. I get home and simply don't want to post. In my way, I'm fighting the distractions.

Is it as bleak as Appleyard paints it? Possibly not. But I do see the lack of focus in younger workers where I am. They try to do engineering while listening to their iPods. They don't focus the way those I started with in this field used to. To this day, I still never have a radio (or an iPod) playing in my work area. It is too distracting.

Read the whole thing.

T Party

While I generally find The New York Times news coverage and editorial positions to be badly skewed to the left, the still carry wonderful feature stories. Such as this little gem describing some of the ways people customized their Model T automobiles. The Tin Lizzie turns 100 this year, so this is a fitting tribute to American ingenuity, both on the part of Henry Ford and of his customers.

No duty was too mundane or extreme for the wildly popular T, which became known by the nickname flivver. By jacking up the rear end and replacing one wheel with a pulley and leather drive belt, the Ford made a fine stationary power plant for milling grain or spinning the saw blade of a mobile lumber mill.

Even years after its heyday, the T continued as the Swiss Army knife of automobiles. In the 1930s, a group of New England ski enthusiasts created the first tow rope on the slopes of Woodstock, Vt. Their initial source of power was a well-worn Model T equipped with a Pullford tractor conversion, its huge steel drive wheels turing at just the right speed to reel skiers up the mountain.

Even when the original bodies and frames had rusted away, T owners would swap out the nearly unburstable Ford engines and drive axles to power boats, oil derricks, stationary pumps and other devices .

The car’s do-it-all utility sprang from a combination of stout basic design and widespread availability, said Robert Casey, curator of transportation at The Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Mich., and author of “The Model T: A Centennial History” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

There are some great pictures along with the article. Here's The Henry Ford Museum's pages on the Model T. This is the Model T Ford Club's website. And here is a short illustrated history of the Model T.

ZAP!

Generally speaking, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard do not recommend trying what 33-year old Jessica Lynch of Guemes Island, Washington did. That is, hanging out of a second story window while holding on to a metal railing to take video of a thunderstorm. There is a certain inevitability about what happened next.

Jessica Lynch can be heard screaming in fear after the lightning blew a hole in the ground just feet from where she was recording, in astonishing footage posted on the internet.

Mrs Lynch, 33, says an arc from the lightning struck her on her left thumb, before passing up her arm, across her back and out the other arm. Arcs are electric currents that flow through the air, similar to lightning itself.

Ms. Lynch was able to post the "unedited screaming version" of the video she took. She also has admitted that her strategy for filming thunderstorms requires a little fine tuning. We're not pointing fingers at Ms. Lynch, incidentally. We have been known to send the rest of the occupants of the Crabitat to the basement during violent storms while personally standing outside to take pictures. Having seen Ms. Lynch's video, we will take additional precautions when we photograph storms.

We'll wear brown trousers.

‘Roo Rampage

A 65-year old Australian woman was hospitalized after being savagely attacked by a killer kangaroo. Fortunately, the family dog intervened and drove the marauding marsupial off.

But then, a large male kangaroo inches taller than the 5’6 foot Mrs Neal, suddenly lunged at her.

“The kangaroo has just jumped up and launched straight at her,” he told local newspapers. “He hit her once and she just dropped and rolled. My dog heard her screaming and bolted down and chased him off.

“If it wasn’t for the dog she’d probably be dead.”

Mrs Neal was discharged from hospital, but her son said she was in “a bad way”.

“Her face has been ripped apart, her hand has been mauled, and she’s got scratches all over her back and concussion,” he said. “Her whole body is sore where she has dropped to the ground.”

Up until now, kangaroos have pretty much been concentrating on trying to kill Irish actors. It is a pretty sordid turn of events when they start mugging pensioners. If you read the article, you'll be informed that the family's home has a serious 'roo infestation. They basically can't take a step in any direction without tripping over a kangaroo.