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Organic Food - A Benifit less Stuff

2009-08-03T22:09:00.001+05:30

For the past five years Margo O’Neill has chosen to live on a diet consisting almost entirely of organic food. Although she admits her £200-a-week shopping bill would be lower if she bought ordinary fare, O’Neill insists the benefits outweigh the costs.

“The food tastes better and it gives me more energy,” said O’Neill, a grandmother from Hampstead, north London. She is a firm believer that organic food is healthier. So she was more than a little vexed when the Food Standards Agency (FSA) published a report last week saying the opposite.

The government body claimed a comprehensive review of scientific evidence showed that people who believe organic food — which, on average, costs 60% more than ordinary food — is healthier are wasting their money. “There is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food,” declared Gill Fine, the FSA’s director of dietary health.

The controversial findings touched a raw nerve. Within hours of the report’s publication, hate mail began to flood into the author’s e-mail inbox. Organic industry experts took to the airwaves to brand the FSA’s methodology “flawed”; and the Soil Association, which represents organic farmers, accused the FSA of “following the dogma of the conventional food industry”.

Richard Corrigan, an Irish chef who runs two central London restaurants, was even blunter. “As a professional cooking food for 33 years,” he said, “I can tell you that anyone who says organic food tastes worse than the stuff you get on a supermarket shelf needs to put his head in my deep-fat fryer.”

Rather than sweeping away misconceptions, the report appeared to entrench people’s existing beliefs. “I don’t care what they claim,” said O’Neill, sitting outside a bustling Planet Organic supermarket in central London. “It’s never going to change my mind.”

In contrast, Keith Lewis, a 43-year-old telecoms engineer, felt his long-standing scepticism about organic food had been vindicated. “I’ve always suspected there was something dubious about the organic claims, mainly because it costs so much more,” he said.

“It’s primarily an appearance thing, where if you pay that extra price you’re somehow proving you’re doing your bit for the world.

“Well, here [the report] is and it says organic food is a load of rubbish — it’s an emperor’s clothes moment, I hope.”

Who is right? And even if organic food is no more nutritious than other produce, does that comprehensively torpedo the case for buying it?

FOR centuries food was produced largely without intensive industrial methods and artificial chemicals — in other words, organically. Only during the later 20th century did farmers start regularly to use new, and often untested, synthetic chemicals to increase crop yields.

In the 1980s, as public disquiet grew over animal welfare and the use of fertilisers, demand grew for a return to a more ecological style of farming. Organic food production increased by about 20% a year, far ahead of the rest of the industry. In the past five years sales of organic food in Britain almost doubled, from less than £900m in 2003 to about £2 billion last year, although they are believed to have dipped in the recession.

The backing of celebrity chefs, as well as the Prince of Wales and his Duchy Originals range, took the movement into middle-class homes. But evidence for its health benefits has been mixed, with a number of studies reaching contradictory conclusions. It led David Miliband, then environment secretary, to say in 2007 that buying organic was a “lifestyle choice that people can make”.

The purpose of the FSA study was to clear up the confusion once and for all. Led by Alan Dangour, a public health nutritionist from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, researchers sifted some 50 years of studies into organic food, analysing nutritional reviews of fruit, vegetables, dairy products and meat.

However, Dangour’s analysis was narrower than its scope at first appears. Of 162 relevant studies identified, only 55 were deemed to be of “satisfactory quality”. While the 55 studies did show that organic food had higher levels of acidity and phosphorous, and conventional food had more nitrates, Dangour concluded that these results were irrelevant.

“There is no shortage of phosphorous in our diet and acidity is about taste. Neither have any relevance to public health,” said Dangour. The FSA concluded that the analysis turned up no “statistically significant” differences between organic and non-organic food for 20 of 23 nutritional categories.

The organic industry was swift to disagree. Other experts greeted the results with a combination of fury and disbelief. Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association, said: “I’ve read the report and the devil is in the detail. The detail clearly shows there are real differences in nutrition.”

The FSA researchers do acknowledge higher levels of some beneficial nutrients in organic compared with nonorganic foods. In organic vegetables the research recorded 53.7% more beta-carotene — which is believed to help protect against heart disease and cancer — as well as 38.4% more flavonoids, 12.7% more proteins and 11.3% more zinc.

The FSA insists these were not relevant because of the overall level of statistical error in the research. Melchett retorts that Dangour selected unreliable reports. “They included ‘shopping basket’ studies [analyses of items people have bought without taking account of factors such as date of harvest], which are very variable and unreliable,” said Melchett.

“If you include such studies, you get lots of variation, allowing you to declare the whole thing statistically insignificant. It is supposed to be a report, not an opinion piece. But it is designed in a way that almost guarantees they are able to claim there is no difference.

“They also excluded all the most recent science. The European Union has just commissioned the biggest research project in the world to look into the differences between organic and non-organic.

“I’m angry and perplexed. We genuinely expected the FSA to report the facts. That’s their job. I’m deeply disappointed that they haven’t. I think it’s outrageous.”

One study that Dangour excluded from his report is an EU-funded four-year study by Carlo Leifert, professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University. Leifert’s paper, which was peer-reviewed, found that organic milk contained 60% more antioxidants and healthy fatty acids than normal milk. Results from his crop studies suggest vitamin levels are up to a fifth higher in organic tomatoes, wheat and onions.

Last week Leifert claimed that the FSA study was misleading. “They have ignored all the recent literature as well as new primary research which shows the heath advantages of organic,” he said. “They admit in their own research that some compounds are 50% higher in organic. How can you call that a non-significance?”

He added: “I’m not happy and I intend to rip their study apart in scientific journals.”

MANY consumers and the organic lobby are also bemused that the FSA study takes no account of pesticides and fertilisers. Even if organic food had no nutritional benefits, they say, it would still be better for your health because it uses far fewer pesticides and fertilisers.

Peter Kindersley, co-founder of the publisher Dorling Kindersley and who runs the 2,250-acre Sheepdrove organic farm in Berkshire, said: “Everyone I talk to just dismisses the FSA. They’ve taken a very narrow view of the issue — the nutrition debate. There is a much wider issue here — pesticides, the environment and sustainability. If the FSA really wanted to do something about nutrition they’d be shouting loudly that we need to go organic and move away from fertilisers.

“Studies have shown these chemicals have an effect on people but the truth is we simply don’t know the full long-term impact. Nobody wants to fund research. It’s a deplorable system that the FSA are trying to shore up.”

Simon Wright, a food consultant for Organic Fair Plus, said concern over the long-term health impact of pesticides and hormones contained in conventional foods is one of the main reasons why people buy organic. “It’s a cocktail effect,” he said. “A variety of pesticides and other chemicals are applied at legal levels but interacting in a way impossible to predict.”

Dangour acknowledges the point, admitting that “the herbicide and pesticide issue is probably worthy of further research”.

However, whether such concerns justify paying the price of organic food is a moot point. As public attitudes have changed, so has the conventional food industry. Several toxic pesticides have been banned and standards of animal husbandry have improved, chipping away at the advantages that organic produce is supposed to have.

There have also been concerns that not all organic food is as free of chemicals as claimed. A recent EU report, which included the UK, found pesticides in some organic products. Most of the organically grown cereals, fruit and vegetables tested contained traces of pesticides below or at the legal limit, but 1.24% were contaminated with toxic residue above the limit, with a potential threat to health.

Amid all these claims and counter-claims, critics suggest that the organic label has become a marketing device as much as a sign of distinctive standards. Instead, they say, the real issue is choosing between well farmed food, organic or otherwise, and bad food created by cheap, industrial farming methods.

A A Gill, the Sunday Times restaurant critic, said: “Organic has no more meaning than a marketing tool.”

In a world that loves branding, the organic label has become a social issue, he suggested: “What I really mind about all this is that organic is making food into a class issue.

“Organic brings back this pre-war system of posh, politically correct food for Notting Hill people; and filthy, rubbish chemical food for filthy, rubbish chemical people. Either you are a nice organic person or you are a filthy, overweight McDonald’s person. I find that really obscene. It has very little to do with food and a lot to do with weird snobbery.”

The real point now is quality, not whether food carries the organic label, he says.

“Most farmers, if they go to the bother of getting a Soil Association accreditation, do it because they can charge more. The organic industry is driven by commercialism,” Gill said.

“The truth is, if you are blindfolded you cannot tell the difference. The real difference is between food produced by good farming and bad farming.”

It is a view with which Dangour, who declined to say whether he buys organic food, appears to have some sympathy. “You know, I make my choices based on health and I’m a nutritionist,” he said. “I do all the cooking and all the shopping at home and I choose what’s healthy for me and my family.”

After all, whichever side you take over the conflicting claims, it is worth remembering that for healthy eating you are probably better off with a non-organic apple than a 100% organic beef burger.

What counts as organic?

To qualify for organic status, farmers must adhere to strict limits on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Instead, pests and diseases are controlled using wildlife and, typically, clover is grown to boost nitrogen in the soil in place of fertilisers. High standards of animal husbandry must be adhered to and all poultry must be free-range. Drugs, antibiotics and wormers are allowed only in emergencies and genetically modified animal feed is banned.

KNOWING YOUR ONIONS

How much more expensive is organic produce?

According to a study by Which? magazine, organic food on average costs 60% more than ordinary produce. But there are huge variations, depending on the product: it may be as little as 10% more, or as much as three times the price.

The higher prices are due to weaker economies of scale. Organic produce is generally grown on smaller farms and often needs to be transported separately. Limits on the number of animals per acre also bump up prices and the lack of fertilisers means yields are between 10% and 50% less than conventional farming.

Is free-range organic?

Not necessarily. Free-range animals are allowed more space and movement; but to qualify as organic, hens must be fed certified organic feed.

Will organic produce get cheaper?

The industry says the price gap will shrink as economies of scale improve and the cost of conventional food rises. It says nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides derived from oil are bound to become more expensive.

How big is the organic industry now?

Farms run on organic lines take up 4% of the UK’s agricultural land but supply a substantial market. Sales of organic food reached £2 billion in the UK last year and, according to the Soil Association, 90% of households bought some form of organic product.

source: timesonline.co.uk

Iron enriched Super Rice

2009-08-03T21:58:00.002+05:30

Zurich researchers have developed a variety of rice containing up to six times more iron than normal white rice grains by adding in two extra genes.

The team at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich hope that their rice will help combat iron deficiency – a major global health problem – in developing countries.

According to the World Health Organization, iron deficiency anaemia is one of the most important contributing factors to the global burden of disease. Pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable.

One of the most common causes is lack of iron in the diet. Rice, a food staple for around half of the world's population, contains iron, but mostly in the outer layers of the rice kernel. This causes a problem, said Christof Sautter, the Zurich project leader.

"In the tropical and subtropical climate the outer layers of the kernel become rancid very quickly during storage and are therefore removed by polishing. The rest of the kernel, which is eaten, contains largely starch and very little else," he told swissinfo.ch.

Scientists have been trying to increase the iron content in the rice kernel. But traditional breeding techniques have so far not worked.

Genetic modification, using a single gene to either improve iron storage or iron transportation in the rice plant, has also been tried with unsatisfactory results. So the Zurich scientists transferred two genes.

Six-fold increase

"We combined both transport and storage improvement with the result that we can now have up to six fold more iron content in the centre of the kernel," Sautter said.

The results of the research led by Sautter and Wilhelm Gruissem were published on July 20 in the online edition of the Plant Biology Journal.

The scientists are pleased about the new rice variety. The prototypes grown in greenhouses behave normally and show no negative effects on the environment, including the iron content of the soil, they say.

"The goal is to offer these plant lines at the end of development to small-scale farmers for free," Sautter said. There won't be any patent fees.

Distribution to farmers is, however, still many years away, as the prototypes are not yet suitable for agricultural development.

The next steps will need to be taken by a body such as the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines or industry, explained Sautter.

Next steps

First the genes would have to be transferred to local varieties. "And then because it's a genetic engineering approach, there are all the safety studies which are required for deregulation and that's a time-consuming task. From the Golden Rice we know that it takes at least five to ten years," he added.

Vitamin A-rich Golden Rice, announced in 2000, was developed by another Federal Institute team and Freiburg University in Germany. The first field trials started in 2004 and are ongoing.

Many countries have regulatory requirements for testing genetically modified organisms. Furthermore, some non-governmental organisations have raised concerns about the possible effects of GMOs on health and the environment.

Sautter believes that people will increasingly accept GMOs. And although the rice's iron content is already nutritionally relevant, the team plans to increase it by 12-fold in the future, so that enough iron can be consumed in one meal.

Nutrition benefits

Those working in nutrition are aware of the benefits of biofortification – the name given to the process whereby plants are bred to have higher nutrient levels in the edible parts, either through conventional breeding and/or modern biotechnology.

Among them is the WHO, which has a programme working against iron deficiency anaemia and other micronutritional deficiencies such as vitamin A and iodine deficiency. The WHO's Micronutrients Unit is headed by Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas.

Pena-Rosas told swissinfo.ch via email that, in theory, biofortified crops and other methods, such as industrial fortification or supplementation, would improve the micronutrient status of those suffering a nutrient deficiency.

He added that those people would need to consume enough of the foodstuff to cover the nutritional gap between their food intake and individual requirements.

"However, much more work still needs to be done before the efficacy and effectiveness of these foods, such as the Zurich rice, are proven to reduce iron deficiency and iron deficiency anaemia."

According to WHO figures, 1.62 billion people are affected by iron deficiency anaemia worldwide, making it the most common global nutritional disorder.

The Zurich scientists hope that their rice could therefore offer a glimmer of hope in combating this far-reaching problem.

source:swissinfo.ch

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Burma Warning on Suu Kyi protests

2009-07-30T19:50:00.001+05:30

Burma's military rulers have warned supporters of jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi not to protest when her trial verdict is announced.

A verdict is expected on Friday in her trial for breaching the terms of her house arrest by allowing an uninvited US man stay in her home in Rangoon.

State media cautioned against protests, saying "we have to ward off subversive elements and disruptions".

Despite international calls for her release, a guilty verdict is expected.

The official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said: "Look out if some arouse the people to take to the streets to come to power. In reality they are anti-democracy elements, not pro-democracy activists."

'Vision warning'

Ms Suu Kyi faces five years in jail if she is convicted.

She is accused of allowing American well-wisher John Yettaw to stay in her lakeside home after he swam there, evading her guards.

He has said he swam to her home to warn her he had a vision that she would be assassinated.

Lawyers for Ms Suu Kyi have not disputed the events, but say she had no control over the situation and that the guards around her home should have kept Mr Yettaw away.

Her lawyers have also argued that the law she has been charged under is part of a constitution abolished 25 years ago.

The trial had initially been expected to last a few days, but has now dragged on for more than two months. Defence lawyers gave their final statements on Tuesday, in response to the prosecution's closing arguments the day before.

Analysts say the Burmese junta may use this trial to make sure the popular pro-democracy leader is still in detention during elections planned for early next year.

Her lawyer, Nyan Win, said Ms Suu Kyi was "preparing for the worst", stockpiling books and medicines.

Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won elections in 1988 but was never allowed to take power.

The 64-year-old has spent nearly 14 of the last 20 years in detention, much of it at her Rangoon home.

Unusually, diplomats from Japan, Singapore, Thailand and the US were allowed to attend the trial in its closing stages.

Analysts suggested that signalled belated recognition on the part of the government at the level of international anger over Ms Suu Kyi's prosecution.

Sony is inFAMOUS

2009-07-30T19:45:00.000+05:30

Studio in talks to adapt the electrifying game.

In the continued onslaught of game-to-film adaptations, the PS3 exclusive open-world superhero-action title infamous has been tapped for the big-screen treatment. Sony Pictures is currently bidding for the rights to the game, a no-brainer since the title was published by Sony Computer Entertainment.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Avi and Ari Arad will produce the film – to be scripted by Sheldon Turner – which involves an everyday bike messenger named Cole MacGrath who is transformed into a lightening-powered bad-ass in the wake of a mysterious explosion. The game, which allows the player to skew good or bad, follows Cole as he takes down three of the city's most nefarious gangs and uncovers a conspiracy of comic-book proportions.

"What excited me most about the game was it was the first of which I've come across that had a big idea and a character arc," Turner said. "It is, I believe, the future of gaming. The game, while big and fun, is at its core a love ballad to the underachiever, which is what our hero, Cole McGrath, is."

Turner is currently scripting a comic-book himself, Warrior, for Top Cow and is best known as the screenwriter of The Longest Yard and the Texas Chainsaw Massacreprequel film. Avi and Ari Arad are currently working on another videogame film, the adaptation of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.

Source: IGNinsider

Jupiter gets a Black Eye

2009-07-24T19:36:00.001+05:30

We sometimes forget that the universe is a violent place.

This week, astronomers in Hawaii recorded an exceedingly rare event. An amazing photograph revealed a comet or asteroid, probably no more than a mile across, plowing into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The impact created a fireball roughly the size of the planet earth.

The good news is that Jupiter was just doing its job, cleaning out the solar system of stray comets and asteroids. Jupiter, 318 times more massive than the earth, acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking in or deflecting debris left over from the solar system’s birth 4.5 billion years ago. If it weren’t for Jupiter’s colossal gravitational field, we wouldn’t be here, since the earth would be hit with deadly comet and meteor impacts every month or so. Most of the U.S. would just be an empty graveyard of bleak craters.

The bad news is that a comet impact could happen to us. A black eye for Jupiter would be a body blow to the earth. We got a taste of this back in 1908, when something the size of an apartment building plowed into Tunguska, Siberia. This “city-buster” flattened 100 million trees with the force of a hydrogen bomb. But this recent Jupiter comet, much larger and coming in at perhaps 100,000 miles per hour, would have unleashed the power of hundreds of H-bombs. It might have engulfed most of the East Coast in a huge firestorm, triggering a massive tsunami and destabilizing the weather.

According to Hollywood, we can always send our astronauts on a space shuttle to intercept a comet and blow it up with H-bombs. Wrong. Blowing up a comet with nuclear bombs creates chunks of debris, increasing the area of destruction. So we are sitting ducks to a potential impact from deep space.

So what’s the lesson from all of this?

Maybe Mother Nature has a sense of humor. An impact like the recent one in Jupiter happened 15 years ago, in late July, after the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet broke up into 20 pieces, each of which plunged into Jupiter, creating a dazzling display of cosmic fireworks. Scientists used to believe that these collisions took place once every few thousand years, not 15 years. So perhaps Mother Nature was just trying to show what little scientists really understand about these cosmic collisions.

But it also happened on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. So maybe Mother Nature was reminding us that the universe is, after all, a violent place—that we may one day need a new home. The earth lies in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery. The proof comes out every night when we gaze at the moon.

When viewing the film of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bobbing among the barren craters of the moon, we are reminded that each crater was gouged out by a titanic impact.

In addition, there are more than 5,000 so-called near-earth objects, carefully tracked by telescope, that can cross near the orbit of the earth. One of them, the asteroid Apophis, is about the size of the Rose Bowl. It will graze the earth in 2029 and again in 2036, passing below some of our satellites.

But there are also many unnamed comets outside the solar system whose orbits are totally unknown and unpredictable. They would give us little warning and catch us totally off-guard, like the comet that just hit Jupiter.

So in the long term, perhaps we should look at the space program as an insurance policy. Not only has the space program given us a bonanza of benefits (such as weather satellites, the Global Positioning System, telecommunications, etc.), it also provides a gateway to the stars. Over the course of the next few centuries, maybe we should use that gateway to plan to be a “two planet species.” Life is too precious to place in one basket.

In August, President Barack Obama will receive a major report from the U.S. human space flight plans committee about the future of space travel, which could be a turning point for NASA in the 21st century. He should remember the Jupiter hit as he considers the report.

Gaint Leaps of Moonstruck Dreamers

2009-07-20T15:15:00.003+05:30

FORTY years ago Monday, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon. But for millennia before him people had been imagining that giant leap in fiction, fables and film. They flew to the Moon in rocket ships, winged chariots and projectiles fired from huge guns. There they met giants, insect-men, Nazis and topless women.
Although pre-1969 stories of lunar voyages were often silly or satirical, Frederick I. Ordway III, a former NASA researcher, argues that they played a critical role in inspiring the scientists who actually put men on the Moon.
“They all read H. G. Wells and Jules Verne," Mr. Ordway said recently. “Science fiction got us all started in the early days, I think without exception.”

Growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s Mr. Ordway devoured science-fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, some 900 of which he would later donate to the Harvard College Library. In the 1940s he was a student member of the American Rocket Society, a space enthusiasts’ organization that built and test-fired small rockets in New York and New Jersey.

After graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a degree in geosciences, Mr. Ordway went to work for Reaction Motors, which built engines for the X-1 and X-15 experimental rocket planes. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s he worked in Huntsville, Ala., with the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and then at the NASA George C. Marshall Space flight center.

In 1965, at the author Arthur C. Clarke's suggestion, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick hired Mr. Ordway as the scientific consultant on "2001: A Space Odyssey." Mr. Ordway has also written and edited more than two dozen books about spaceflight real and imagined.

He said that the earliest known Moon voyage in written history is by the satirist Lucian of Samosata of the second century A.D. Lucian begins his “True History” with a disclaimer that it’s all lies. He goes on to describe sailing on a ship that’s carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. He finds the Moon inhabited by men who ride three-headed vultures and giant fleas, and are at war with the inhabitants of the Sun.

In the 16th century Ariosto’s epic poem "Orlando Furioso" depicts the Moon as the repository of all things misplaced on Earth. The knight Astolfo ventures there in a chariot pulled by four magical horses, to look for mad Orlando’s lost wits.

The development of the telescope in the 17th century spurred much speculation about the Moon and its possible inhabitants. There was even an early space race, on paper at least, as English patriots exhorted their countrymen to colonize the Moon before other nations could.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote his lunar speculations as fiction. In “Somnium”("Dream"), published posthumously in 1634, a young man is carried away by Moon demons. Kepler’s descriptions of a harsh lunar surface are quite accurate, even if he does inhabit it with giant snakes and other creatures. Domingo Gonsales (actually Francis Godwin, the bishop of Hereford) flies to the Moon in a chair pulled by geese in his 17th-century best seller, “The Man in the Moone.” He finds it to be “another Earth,” peopled by giants.

In his satirical “Voyages to the Moon and the Sun,” the poet and wit Cyrano de Bergerac first attempts a lunar flight carried by vials of rising dew but only makes it as far as Canada. He later succeeds, propelled part of the way by rockets, a conveyance that seems to have occurred to very few writers before the 20th century.

In the 18th century Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Munchausen told such tall tales about himself that others joined in, fictionalizing him in his own lifetime. They had him traveling to the Moon once by a giant beanstalk and once in a sailing ship carried, like Lucian’s, by a storm. There he meets the king with a detachable head — depicted by Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988).

Mr. Armstrong had barely set foot on the Moon when a conspiracy theory spread that the lunar landing was a hoax. In "The Sun and the Moon" (Basic Books, 2008) Matthew Goodman describes an earlier Moon hoax perpetrated in the summer of 1835 by The New York Sun. It was a series of articles purported to recount the lunar observations of an actual British astronomer, John Herschel, whose giant telescope allegedly brought him images of shaggy bison, one-horned goats and the “Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat.” The anonymous author, a journalist named Richard Adams Locke, so skillfully blended the scientific and the fantastic that many readers were taken in. Herschel, whose observatory was in South Africa, was not party to the hoax.

“There was tremendous interest in astronomy that year because Halley’s Comet, last seen in 1759, was on its way that fall,” Mr. Goodman said.

One disgruntled reader of Locke’s jest, Mr. Goodman added, was Edgar Allen Poe. That same summer The Southern Literary Messenger published Poe’s own Moon hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” to little notice. By 1844 Moon hoaxes were so common that The Messenger ran a parody, “Recollections of Six Days’ Journey in the Moon. By an Aerio-Nautical Man.” The narrator tells of floating to the Moon using “a new and hitherto unknown science, called Aeriotism, or the faculty of self-suspension in the air.”

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source: nytimes

Swami Vivekananda - 19

2009-07-18T13:16:00.001+05:30

Swami Vivekananda’s contribution to the religion of India can be summed up as follows:

1. God is "impersonal" so far as an ultimate analysis of His being is concerned, for since, in his essence, He is superior to spatial limitation or temporal sequence, He cannot be located in space or limited by time. At the same time, to the individual believer, who has focused his attention on some aspect of His Being, in his desire to visualise His nature and let it be a source of inspiration for his personal needs, God is "personal". But this is a lower degree of "realisation". To the initiated the Divinity is the Reality that pervades the whole Universe and is operative in human thought as well as in the evolution of the Universes. In that mighty consciousness slumbers the mysteries of the worlds and the secrets of human development.

2. Being and Becoming are different aspects of the same reality and are only relative to our intelligence. Man has the promise and potentiality of divine realisation, of spiritual perfection and therefore is God in the making, for even his humanity is intelligible only if regarded as an individualised self-expression of God. It is derogatory to human nature, therefore, to attribute sin to man. Besides, God being the sole and supreme Reality, how could a foreign element like sin invade the sanctuary of being? "The Hindus refuse to call you sinners'. Ye, divinities on earth, sinners! It is a sin to call man so! It is a standing libel on human nature" (from the Swami's address at the Parliament of Religions). On another occasion he wrote: "The sages who wrote the Vedas were preachers of principles. Now and then their names are mentioned, but that is all. We do not know who or what they were. At the same time, just as our God is an impersonal and yet a personal one, so our religion is a most intensely impersonal one, and yet has an infinite scope for the play of persons".

3. The claim of Hinduism to be the universal religion is that it preaches principles and does not demand loyalty to persons. As for religions that have gathered round the personality of some individual, "smash the historicity of the man, and the religion tumbles to the ground. The glory of Krishna was not that he was a Krishna, but that he was a teacher of Vedanta."

4. Since God is all and all is God, the world perceived by the senses is of an illusory nature, the only true world or state of being is that of intuitive realisation of spiritual reality, which is the recognition of the soul's identity with the Ultimate Reality called Brahma. According to this hypothesis the Ideal and the Real merge into one and all discriminations are brushed aside between Being and Becoming. It falls beyond the scope of this book to offer criticisms of the above statements. We can only say in passing that side by side with vigorous and bold thinking, there is serious confusion of issues and impatience with reducing the ideas to a system. The Swami's ideas have not been reduced to a coherent system, but are brilliant flashes of genius alternating with mere verbal jugglery and empty flourishes of rhetoric.

5. The East is profoundly spiritual and religious, the West profoundly practical and political, but in the main, irreligious and materialistic. Both have to learn a great deal from each other. The Swami's great ambition was to set up a commerce in ideas between the East and the West, analogous to the exchange of commodities between the nations. He would say: "Send a ship-load of doctors and teachers out to India, and we shall send you missionaries of religion." He would also say: "For clear thinking and sound idealism the Greeks ; for efficiency, business reliability and the love for personal and national freedom the English ; but for audacity in religious thinking and for philosophical acumen the Indians".

6. He had a bold vision of a spiritual federation of humanity, heedless of caste, colour and creed. He was grievously disappointed at the treatment meted out to the African Americans in America.

7. The fundamental unity of mankind he perceived in the central fact of the common relation all bore to the Immanent Life. He had great veneration for Christ and spoke of Him as "a disembodied, unfettered soul." He would ever and anon speak of the "Christ in you," the kingdom of heaven in your hear" and so on.

8. But finally his lasting achievement was to infuse a spirit of active philanthropy and social cooperation into an individualistic scheme of abstract philosophy. He called it "practical vedantism" or New Vedantism, the idea being that reunion with the Divine Life is best accomplished through selfless service and devotion to man.

Toyota and Mazda in talks over hybrid technology

2009-07-17T19:14:00.001+05:30

Toyota Motor Corp. is considering sharing its hybrid technology with Mazda Motor Corp., a move that would help the Toyota system become the industry standard in the eco-car market, sources said Thursday.

A senior Toyota executive said the company is in talks with Mazda and has received requests from other automakers for tie-ups concerning its hybrid technology.

Toyota, the world's largest automaker, let Ford Motor Co. use its patented hybrid technology in 2004. The Japanese automaker started providing its hybrid system to Nissan Motor Co. in 2006.

If an agreement is reached with Toyota, Mazda, which plans to introduce hybrid vehicles in the first half of the 2010s, will be able to catch up with other automakers in the field.

For Toyota, such tie-ups bring economy of scale and reduce the costs of its own hybrid vehicles.

Moreover, the spread of its technology will help Toyota's hybrid system become a dominant force in the eco-car market, where various kinds of technology exist.

Toyota's hybrid system combines a gasoline engine and an electric motor. It is energy efficient because it converts energy that arises when a vehicle slows down into electricity, which is stored in a battery and used as motive power.

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Organic Tomatoes

2009-07-14T11:54:00.004+05:30

Reducing our food down to its micronutrients is the most unromantic way to look at food we’ve come up with yet. Gone are the descriptions that tempt us and make our mouths water. We’ve tossed out the sweet, tang of a tomato on our lip and replaced it with the cancer fighting attribute of lycopene. But replace we must. In order for science to recognize the health benefits of food and specifically, the differences between organic and conventionally farmed food, they need definite benchmarks to note. Of course, time and time again science does find that organically raised and grown meat and produce are healthier and contain less toxins.

The scientists at the University of California, Davis conducted a 10 year study of tomatoes to find out if organically grown tomatoes were truly more nutritious than their conventionally grown counterparts. The study found that the mean levels of various micronutrients were between 79 and 97% higher in the organic tomatoes versus the conventional tomatoes. Additionally, they found that flavonoid levels continued to increase in the organic samples, whereas these same flavonoid levels remained the same in the conventionally raised crop.

Tomatoes are the second most highly consumed vegetable (although it is technically a fruit) in the USA, second only to the potato. They contain high levels of vitamins C and A, lycopene, and flavonoids (quercetin, kaempferol, and naringenin).

One last thing to keep in mind when deciding whether to eat organic tomatoes, there are more genetically modified (GMO) tomatoes on the market today than ever before. And sadly, our producers are not regulated to note if a product contains any GMO materials. Organic foods are not allowed to contain GMO content. Sneak Peek: More about GMO to come. Stay tuned.

But all of this talk about the science of tomatoes doesn’t account for it’s popularity. Most of us have been enjoying these tangy fruits since long before we even knew what lycopene was. There are various flavors, colors, sizes and uses for tomatoes that span all cuisines. From sauce to fried, to salads and casseroles, tomatoes are delicious, versatile and nutritious.

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Source: Examiner

Headaches?, Get on to Your Bicycle

2009-07-13T09:47:00.002+05:30

We're always being told that regular exercise is the best way to improve our health and stave off obesity. But did you know that specific types of exercise can help to reduce the symptoms of many common ailments?

Here we review the latest evidence to find out how you can ease health problems ranging from IBS to osteoporosis through the right choice of exercise.

IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME

The cure: Yoga

How often: Four hours a week

How it works: IBS is thought to affect around eight million Britons, although with no confirmed cause, diagnosis is tricky and treatment of the debilitating symptoms - which include abdominal bloating and cramping, diarrhoea and constipation - is even more difficult.

However, researchers are beginning to discover that therapies focusing on the mind as well as the body are helpful to sufferers. Gastroenterologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver found the ancient practice of yoga to be particularly effective.

Subjects who were given a yoga lesson and then asked to do four hours of yoga moves a week at home, guided by an instructional DVD, had significantly fewer abdominal symptoms and less anxiety compared to a control group who stuck to their normal daily routine.

Another study conducted at the University of Birmingham found 30 minutes of activity (including yoga) five days a week helped IBS.

So why should yoga be beneficial for IBS? It's thought to help treat the mind as well as the body - the same reason cognitive behavioural therapy (or CBT) has proven to help IBS sufferers.

Also try: Swimming or aqua-aerobics. Both are the kind of low-impact forms of aerobic exercise that have shown to be helpful when performed in moderation (3-5 times a week).

BACK PAIN

The cure: Alexander Technique

How often: A course of 24 lessons, then daily

How it works: Regular activity has long been known to ease chronic back pain, but a study published in the British Medical Journal last year suggested the popular postural awareness therapy Alexander Technique could provide the greatest benefit. Devised by Frederick Matthias Alexander, an Australian actor who suffered stress-induced breathing problems, this method re-educates the body to achieve postural harmony.

A teacher will assess your posture and how you move about. Then he or she will teach you how to sit up straight, walk without hunching over and other techniques to improve balance and co-ordination and relieve pressure on the spine.

Professor Paul Little, a primary care specialist who specialises in back problems, found that one year after the trial started, the average number of activities limited by back pain had fallen by 42 percent in the Alexander group, and the number of days in pain were only three a month, compared with 21 days in the control group. The Alexander group said their quality of life increased enormously as they were pain-free.

Also try: Pilates. This aims to strengthen the core muscles that support the spine; several studies have shown it significantly reduces chronic back pain.

HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE

The cure: Hiking

How often: 30-60 minutes at least three times a week

How it works: Hiking on rocky or uneven ground has profound benefits for health. If you can find some cobblestones to walk over, even better. Physiologists at the Oregon Research Institute found cobblestone-walking, an activity rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, led to significant reductions in blood pressure and improvements in balance.

It is thought that the uneven surfaces might stimulate acupressure points on the soles of the feet, thereby regulating blood pressure. According to the theories of Chinese medicine, applying pressure to acupressure points around the body helps to clear blocked channels that can lead to illness and problems such as high blood pressure. Because it is challenging, it will burn more calories than walking on even ground.

In the Oregon study, which was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Dr Fuzhong Li asked subjects either to take part in a 60-minute group session of walking on cobblestone mats or to take a walk three times a week for 16 weeks.

At the end of the study, mat-walkers had better scores on measures of balance, physical function and blood pressure than those in the conventional walking group.

Also try: Tai chi, the ancient martial art, has been shown to have benefits for several aspects of heart disease, including high blood pressure. A study presented to the American Heart Association showed that Tai Chi lowered blood pressure in older adults nearly as much as moderate-intensity aerobic exercise such as running.

GUM DISEASE

The cure: Aerobics

How often: Three classes a week of 45 minutes to one hour duration

How it works: Until recently, good oral hygiene habits of brushing and flossing regularly were the only health behaviours identified as helping to prevent gum disease.

But a study of more than 12 000 people published in the Journal of Periodontology revealed that regular gym-goers who did a range of aerobic classes were 40 percent less likely to develop periodontitis, a gum infection that can result in loss of teeth and lead to an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Researchers from the Case Western Reserve University in the US found that five or more moderate physical activity sessions or three intensive activity sessions a week combined with a healthy diet and oral health regimen reduced the risk of gum disease.

Exercise reduces the C-reactive protein in the blood associated with inflammation in the heart and periodontal disease, while healthy eating habits also reduce the production of plaque biofilm, the main factor linked to gum disease.

Also try: Spinning, the high-intensity group indoor cycling class, could also help because the high effort it requires is similar to aerobics.

DEPRESSION

The cure: Walking.

How often: 30 minutes a day.

How it works: Feeling blue? Then "ecotherapy" - walking in a park or the countryside - could be the key to boosting your mood. Several researchers have found walking to be the best way to banish mild to moderate depression and Mental health charity Mind says the best places to walk are parks or the countryside.

According to studies at the University of Essex commissioned by Mind, a walk surrounded by nature reduces depression whereas a walk in a shopping centre or city increases mood problems. A study found that three brisk 30-minute walks a week had greater effects on reducing depression than antidepressant drugs.

Six months after 150 subjects had completed the 16-week walking programme, only 8 percent saw their depression return. Ecotherapy works by boosting the feel-good hormones endorphins by walking and tapping into our instinctive enjoyment of nature.

Kite-flying or gardening have also been shown to help.

OSTEOPOROSIS

The cure: Running

How often: 30 minutes, three to five days a week

How it works: Activities that are "high impact" (which involve pounding on the ground) boost bone density and help to prevent the brittle bone disease osteoporosis, but running tops the lot, according to experts.

In a study published earlier this year, Pam Hinton, professor of nutrition and physiology at the University of Missouri, compared the long-term effects of running, cycling and weight-training on bone density, and found that regular runners had the strongest spines.

"Both weight-training and high-impact endurance activities will increase bone mineral density," Hinton says. "But a high-impact sport such as running appears to have a greater beneficial effect."

She adds that those who do only non-weight-bearing exercise, such as cycling, swimming or rowing, should try to incorporate some runs into their fitness programme.

Also try: Tennis, basketball and skipping, because they each involve some of the pounding that is required for weight-bearing exercise.

DIABETES

The cure: Weight-training

How often: Twice a week

How it works: People with Type 2 diabetes are usually advised to do more aerobic exercise (running, swimming and cycling, for example) to lower body fat and improve glucose control. But a recent study showed that adding weight-training to the mix could have positive results.

Professor Robin Marcus, of the American Physical Therapy Association, asked Type 2 diabetics to take part in a 16-week supervised workout programme.

Half of the subjects did only aerobic exercise for 30 minutes a day, five days a week; the rest did a combination of aerobic activity and twice-weekly weights performed using a leg-strengthening machine at the gym.

After three months, both groups had less body fat and improved glucose control. But those using the weights also had a decreased Body Mass Index, used as a benchmark for ideal height-to-weight ratio and stronger leg muscles.

"Aerobic exercise should not be used in isolation," says Marcus. Adding resistance training to the mix increases the amount of lean muscle issue, which boosts metabolism and helps to control glucose levels, Marcus says.

Also try: Body Pump classes - a mix of weight training and aerobics - are an easy way to get the mix of exercise. Try two classes a week.

HEADACHES

The cure: Cycling

How often: 30 minutes, three to four times a week

How it works: For some people who suffer regular headaches, exercise can act as a trigger although no experts understand exactly why. Several researchers have suggested that endurance activities such as cycling and indoor rowing can be helpful, possibly because they raise the levels of feel-good hormones like endorphins that also act as natural painkillers.

A recent study published in the Journal of Head and Face Pain showed that indoor or outdoor cycling had reduced the frequency of attacks by 90 percent.

Dr Emma Varkey of the Cephalea Headache Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, based her findings on a survey of 68 000 adults and showed that inactive subjects were 14 percent more likely to develop headaches over an 11-year period.

Cycling seems to help, Varkey says, because the continuous aerobic activity increases oxygen distribution. With cycling, there is also none of the pounding that comes with running, aerobics and power-walking that can sometimes lead to headaches.

Activities that place excessive strain on the body (such as weight lifting) should obviously be avoided.

It is worth noting that headaches that occur during a workout can be caused by dehydration or low blood-sugar (from eating too little carbohydrate prior to a gym session).

Also try: At the University of California's Davis Medical Centre, a study showed that 75 percent of all headaches arise from muscle tension in the back of the neck, specifically the semispinalis capitis muscles, due to problems in posture. Regular yoga was found to correct this, reducing the frequency of headaches.

Source: Sunday Independent

Sri Lanka and a Consistent Philosophy of Goodness

2009-07-13T09:39:00.002+05:30

Plato, in The Republic, wrote the ideal society can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed of humanity itself, until philosophers become kings and kings truly become philosophers. At this important juncture in time, the major powers of the world and their political leaders and citizens should consider and pursue a consistent philosophy of goodness. Specifically, towards nations committing horrendous atrocities and acts of genocide.

With this in mind, numerous human rights organization are reporting that in Sri Lanka

1,400 people, mainly Tamil refugees who were forcibly bombed and driven from their homes, are dying each week at the Nanik Farm internment camp. While the Sri Lankan Government continues to claim victory for its recent defeat of the Tamil Tigers, or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), other concentration camps, called "welfare villages," are being constructed to house hundreds of thousands of people.

Opposition leader Mangala Samaraweera said the Sri Lankan Government is trying to change the ethnic balance of the area. There are reasons to support his allegation, since not only the Tamil Tigers but other groups have complained of human rights violations. At the same time, Sri Lanka's globalization efforts through the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and transnational corporations have failed to provide adequate employment for everyone. Political and economic violence towards minorities have risen dramatcially.

Democratic principles too have been reversed. The concept of regional representation is being diminished, along with Amendment Thirteen to the Sri Lankan Constitution. Both political initiatives tried to decentralize power and increase provincial representation by giving regional councils more control over education, the power to tax, make laws, and resolve land settlement claims. With the defeat of the LTTE and relocation of hundreds of thousands of people, fair and proportional government will more than likely suffer.

As most of the world remains silent and inactive, maybe Aristotle was right when he wrote that men are good in one way, but bad in many. And perhaps St. Augustine understood the goodness and evil in human nature, believing that no one was free to do good who has not been freed from sin and begins to be the servant of justice. Hannah Arendt, who wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, referred to institutional violence and genocide as the banality of evil. Don Helder Camara, a Liberation Theologian, said it was the duty of all human beings to help people escape from the inhuman situation in which they find themselves.

As the twentieth century ended and at the start of this century, there still remains explosions of racism, hatred, and violence. Hundreds of thousands were killed in Central America, Rwanda, Congo, East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. Many more are being murdered in Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Some nations recognized this banality of evil, pursued a philosophy of goodness, and intervened saving hundreds of thousands of lives. At other times, nations missed the opportunity to help people escape from the inhuman situation allowing hundreds of thousands to be killed. Inconsistent philosophies of goodness usually create holocaust-like events.

And still, a few major powers redefined the philosophy of goodness and initiated needless wars and brutal occupation campaigns. Perchance this is where the problem lies: in how we rationalize good and evil, or how we mistakenly believe ours is an age of technical and enlightened superiority. Such ways of thinking make us falsely assume that there is no right or wrong, redemption or murder, and the betterment of life or the destruction of life. Instead, modern and futuristic goodness is happiness, beauty, the greatest good for the most, and if something is useful. If not always, it is those in power impose their happiness, beauty, and concept of usefulness onto the powerless, or define what the greatest good is.

In other words, when morality is removed from goodness, it becomes diluted, elusive, subjective, another concept to be used like an object, and tragically irrelevant. Thus, genocides become good, wars become good, invasions and occupations become good, concentration camps become good, massacres become good, bombs become good, tanks become good, warships become good, and the people that are killed are bad.

There is also good oil, good diamonds, good forests, and good land. And the people resisting exploitation or fight for their traditional way of life are labeled evil and are murdered. There are even good military bases, like Diego Garcia located in the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka. It depopulated the island and currently practices good torture against prisoners in good CIA black sites. It is also serves good missions that bomb targets in Iraq and Afghanistan 4,000 miles away, namely for oil and imperial ambitions in Central Asia.

But moral goodness, on the other hand, would require the forces of Diego Garcia to intervene in Sri Lanka's killing fields. And by all means, let's first sit around the corporate offices and U.N. tables and argue about the deontological and teleological nature of moral goodness. (I am being facetious.) In the meantime, we miss the greatest definition of moral goodness: the saving and protection of human lives.

If there is ever to be a more peaceful and life-giving order, versus a life-destroying order, a consistent philosophy of moral goodness needs to be established. Meanwhile, groups in Sri Lankan continue to suffer from extrajudicial killings, abductions by paramilitary groups, and the International Red Cross and other organizations have been forced to close their offices. Tamil refugees continue to die too. Doesn't this answer the question to what is a consistent philosophy of moral goodness and when should a nation intervene?

If so, it is time to confront the banality of evil and transform it into the originality of moral goodness and action. Jeff McMahan writes in the preface of his new book, Killing in War, that "political leaders are utterly powerless to kill large numbers of people without the acquiescence and complicity of all those who rationalize, pay for, and perpetrate those killings." The greatest tragedy is not when bad nations do bad things, for that is expected, but when good nations do nothing. Will Sri Lanka's systematic elimination of a people go undocumented, like so many others have throughout history?

source: World News

Google's Operating System

2009-07-13T09:34:00.001+05:30

“A real rival to Windows.” “Google drops a nuclear bomb on Microsoft.” It all sounds so dramatic and exciting, the kind of story we journalists love. But I can’t help feeling most of the coverage of Google’s announcement of its Chrome operating system missed the real point.

Most people seem to assume that the Chrome operating system is intended to replace Windows on personal computers, and that it will be a failure if it doesn’t. Many people also believe that Google is either off its rocker in jumping into operating systems or doing it out ofspite for Microsoft. Although Google may well be overreaching here, and it faces many challenges in creating and getting support for a new operating system, I think those assumptions are largely flawed.

It’s an easy story to pit Google against Microsoft, partly because there’s some truth to the increasing tension between the two tech titans. But they’re each representative of a bigger battle going on, one that would happen regardless: the inexorable migration of computing (except for the interface to the computer you need to put your fingers on, of course) from the desktop and laptop to the Internet.

Essentially, Google is attempting to create an operating system tuned to the needs of the Post-PC Age, as my former colleague Richard Brandt, author of the book Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain, puts it. That age has not arrived yet, and it may not arrive completely for a long time, but the trend is apparent: People increasingly are doing more and more of their work online, for which they don’t need or want the cost and performance overhead of a traditional PC operating system. That goes double for the vast majority of people around the world who have no PC at all—and something cheap beyond a cell phone that gives them the full experience of the Web would open up a vast new population of Web users.

And the bottom line is that anything that makes it easier for all those people to use Google services and view its advertising helps Google.

First of all, let's put to rest the notion that Google expects to replace Windows, at least anytime soon. "It's not a direct assault on Windows at all," says Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett. "Chrome OS will be streamlined and tuned for interacting with online services and thepersonal cloud."

In other words, it's intended at least at first to provide an additional option for the increasing number of people who do most of their work online to do so quickly and cheaply. What would a personal computer outfitted with Chrome OS look like? Michael J. Miller at PCMag.com has an idea:

It wouldn't be what we think of as a PC; instead it would be much more purpose-built for surfing the web than even today's netbooks. It wouldn't run any local applications: no Microsoft Office, of course; but also no Open Office, iTunes, or even a local mail client, although a webmail client could be cached by Google Gears. But it could boot much faster, be more secure, and could be less expensive. ...
These would really be "companions" to full PCs, not replacements. To a great extent, this is also what Qualcomm is talking about with its "smartbook" concept, and the other ARM-based vendors as well. So Google isn't really trying to create a new device; but rather be the software for it.

In fact, I'm not sure why Chrome OS couldn't be a second operating system on the same machine. After all, it's free, and both disk and flash-memory storage is pretty cheap, so I'm not sure I see much downside in installing both on a machine. And people are already doing this sort of thing on the Apple Mac, in some cases running Windows when they need to run a Windows-only application.

So if all you want to do is get online to browse the Web, check email, view video, tweet or update your Facebook page, edit some online documents, buy a book from Amazon.com--and think about it, that's a lot of what we do on a PC today--you get online in a few seconds and just go. If you work on a plane or use a Windows application like Word, go ahead and boot that up just like you can do on a Mac outfitted with Parallels. "I just want my s--t to run," says Dan Florio, developer of the iPhone app RunPee. "Chrome OS is sounding like the right idea."

Viewed in this light, Google's decision to create an operating system seems like a pretty obvious thing to do. In fact, you'd almost have to say they'd be kind of stupid not to do it, given the direction of user behavior and the advance of technologies that enable more and more online-only work. "The world is hungry for innovation on the operating system," says Sebastien de Halleux, cofounder and COO of the social gaming developer Playfish. "This is coming at the right time."

This is all assuming Google can pull it off. This clearly won't be easy, or Google wouldn't have announced it a year in advance and called for the help of outside developers. But it may be somewhat simpler than it looks. For one thing, it's building the OS atop a Linux "kernel," or foundation. So it doesn't have to reinvent everything, just leverage what already has been created.

Google also doesn't even need to attract developers to the OS, at least not in the usual way. Software programmers need only create a Web application using common platforms such as Adobe Flash, and they should run on the Chrome OS. Indeed, for that reason, one might make the case, as some have, that Chrome OS isn't even that big a deal.

Finally, Google doesn't need to knock it out of the park. As Rich Brandt puts it:

The Chrome OS is a catalyst. It will show others the way, and act as the seed that moves many industries, from telecommunications to computers, and perhaps someday to television and books, into the Post-PC era and into the true Internet Age.

Remember when Google made noises about bidding for new wireless spectrum in late 2007, only to bow out? That resulted in competition in the wireless business revving up, arguably to Google's advantage, and on Verizon's dime. Likewise, although Google's Chrome browser has minuscule market share, you can be sure the enthusiasm of some Web influentials for its speed hasn't escaped Microsoft or Mozilla, which will keep improving their browsers to avoid losing any more share.

I'm not saying that Google is above throwing a few marbles in Microsoft's way. It may not work, but if anything, Google executives have a fiduciary duty to do so, because that's business. You don't need to assume Eric Schmidt is desperately obsessed with Microsoft to find logical reasons for what Google's doing. (In fact, there's probably a greater case to be made that Microsoft has been obsessed with Google for a long time. Schmidt himself was wary of Google doing an operating system, he said last Thursday.)

All that said, there's a real danger that a Google operating system further stirs up Microsoft's wrath, and if it does, the software giant could inflict some damage on Google. Even more worrisome, Anil Dash makes a compelling case that in announcing plans for an operating system--whatever kind it turns out to be--Google has reached its own "Microsoft moment":

The era of Google as a trusted, "non-evil" startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over. ... Google is entering the moment where it has to be over-careful not to offend, and extremely attentive to whether they are treading lightly.
Is Google evil? It doesn't matter. They've reached the point of corporate ambition and changing corporate culture that means they're going to be perceived as if they are. Whether they're able to truly internalize that lesson, accept it, and act accordingly will determine if they're able to extend their dominance in the years to come.

Such existential concerns are real, as one prominent Googler, Matt Cutts, acknowledged. But the fact remains that Google continues to face an aggressive Microsoft that requires it to think outside the search box. Microsoft's new search engine Bing, let's not forget, is the default search engine for its industry-leading Internet Explorer browser.

And if Microsoft responds by fighting back and making sure Windows works better for online applications (thus preventing Chrome OS from getting a foothold), that can only help Google as the key economic beneficiary of anything that makes the Web more useful.

Sure, this is a risky bet for Google. But it might be even riskier not to make it.

source: business week

Costarica is World's Greenest and Happiest Country

2009-07-04T22:17:00.001+05:30

Costa Rica is the greenest and happiest country in the world, according to a new list that ranks nations by combining measures of their ecological footprint with the happiness of their citizens.

Britain is only halfway up the Happy Planet Index (HPI), calculated by theNew Economics Foundation (NEF), in 74th place of 143 nations surveyed. The United States features in the 114th slot in the table. The top 10 is dominated by countries from Latin America, while African countries bulk out the bottom of the table.

The HPI measures how much of the Earth's resources nations use and how long and happy a life their citizens enjoy as a result. First calculated in 2006, the second edition adds data on almost all the world's countries and now covers 99% of the world's population.

NEF says the HPI is a much better way of looking the success of countries than through standard measures of economic growth. The HPI shows, for example, that fast-growing economies such as the US, China and India were all greener and happier 20 years ago than they are today.

"The HPI suggests that the path we have been following is, without exception, unable to deliver all three goals: high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and 'one-planet living'," says Saamah Abdallah, NEF researcher and the report's lead author. "Instead we need a new development model that delivers good lives that don't cost the Earth for all."

Costa Ricans top the list because they report the highest life satisfaction in the world, they live slightly longer than Americans, yet have an ecological footprint that is less than a quarter the size. The country only narrowly fails to achieve the goal of what NEF calls "one-planet living": consuming its fair share of the Earth's natural resources.

The report says the differences between nations show that it is possible to live long, happy lives with much smaller ecological footprints than the highest-consuming nations.

The new HPI also provides the first ever analysis of trends over time for what are supposedly the world's most developed nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

OECD nations' HPI scores plummeted between 1960 and the late 1970s. Although there have been some gains since then, HPI scores were still higher in 1961 than in 2005.

Life satisfaction and life expectancy combined have increased 15% over the 45-year period for those living in the rich nations, but it has come at the cost of a 72% rise in their ecological footprint. And the three largest countries in the world – China, India and the US, which are aggressively pursuing growth-based development models – have all seen their HPI scores drop in that time.

The highest placed western nation is the Netherlands. People there live on average over a year longer than people in the US, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – yet their per capita ecological footprint is less than half the size. The Netherlands is therefore over twice as environmentally efficient at achieving good lives as the US, Nef says.

The report sets out a "Happy Planet Charter" calling for an unprecedented collective global effort to develop a "new narrative" of human progress, encourage good lives that don't cost the earth, and to reduce consumption in the highest-consuming nations – which it says is the biggest barrier to sustainable wellbeing.

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15 baby Turtles Seized from 2 businessmen

2009-07-04T22:14:00.000+05:30

LUCENA CITY, Philippines—Two local Chinese businessmen about to transport 15 freshwater turtles to Manila were arrested by the police Friday afternoon but released three hours later pending further investigation.

Superintendent Ronaldo Ylagan, Lucena police chief, identified the businessmen as Noli Sia and Willie Tan, both residents of this city.

A police report said that at around 3:30 p.m., the two men, carrying two boxes, were about to board a Manila-bound passenger bus at the Lucena Grand Central Terminal.

When the bus dispatcher inspected the boxes, he discovered the juvenile live green turtles and immediately notified the police.

A police team arrived and invited the Chinese businessmen to the police station for questioning.

“According to the two, they bought the turtles from an ambulant vendor. They are going to Manila to give the turtles as wedding gift to a friend who is fond of collecting water creatures,” Ylagan said.

The police was forced to release the two men later in the evening pending an official recommendation on the matter from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which was expected to be submitted on Monday.

“The local DENR people were not able to confirm the species of the seized turtles, if they are included in the endangered list, threatened or whatever. They took photos of the turtles and sent them to the Manila office for official comment,” Ylagan said.

However, lawyer Sheila de Leon, Tanggol Kalikasan-Southern Tagalog chief, explained that even if the seized turtles were not on the list of endangered species, the two men would still be criminally liable for violation of RA 9147 (Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act).

She maintained that transport of any kind of wildlife should be accompanied by an official permit from the Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau.

source: www.inquirer.net

Possible Cause for Swine flu

2009-07-02T10:58:00.004+05:30

The swine flu pandemic may have been caused by an accidental leak from a laboratory three decades ago, scientists have claimed.

An investigation into the genetic make-up of flu viruses claims the pandemic may not have occurred, had it not been for the accidental release of the same strain of influenza virus from a research lab in 1977.

The Independent reported that researchers believe this strain of the virus had been extinct in the human population for more than 20 years until it was unwittingly reintroduced by scientists.

The study in The New England Journal of Medicine said: 'Careful study of the genetic origin of the (1977) virus showed that it was closely related to a 1950 strain, but dissimilar to influenza 'A' (H1N1) strains from both 1947 and 1957.

'This finding suggested that the 1977 outbreak strain has been preserved since 1950. The re-emergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source.'

The strain is thought to be behind the pandemic in 1977 which began in Russia and China.

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Cause for Swine Flu

Audi partners with Facebook

2009-07-01T12:31:00.002+05:30

Audi TDI clean diesel engines kick out 20% less carbon emissions than regular gasoline engines, and Audi wants you to know it. So they have launched a Facebook campaign with two goals -- to convince you that the new Audi clean diesel technology from Germany is a great green drive, and also raise $25,000 for The Nature Conservancy.

Audi is donating $1 for every person who joins Audi's Facebook fan page. I just joined -- it's your turn now. So, we need 24,999 Examiner readers to do the same. It doesn't cost you anything but a couple of mouse clicks, and you are helping the environment. And I know you are a tree hugger, or at least a tree admirer, because you are here, reading about green cars.

The donation directly benefits The Nature Conservancy voluntary carbon offset program. The first project is to restore the habitats of local, native plants and animals, in the Lower Mississippi Valley, by buying up land to keep it from development, and planting trees and other green things. The official description is ‘reforestation’ which means protecting and restoring forests and woodland.

Audi and The Nature Conservancy have similar goals – to reduce carbon emissions and help achieve energy independence. Okay, maybe energy independence is a stretch – but at least we can get out of first gear with more fuel efficient vehicles. Anyway, for sure, it’s an interesting marketing campaign.

BTW – The Nature Conservancy is responsible for the protection of more than 18 million acres in the United States, and has helped preserve more than 117 million acres of ecologically important lands and waters in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific.

"Our engineers are always innovating to reduce our vehicles’ carbon emissions, and we’ve taken a giant leap forward with the introduction of the Audi Q7 TDI clean diesel this year," said Johan de Nysschen, President, Audi of America. "But our commitment doesn’t stop with our products; we want to promote reduced emissions through support of organizations like The Nature Conservancy, and also to spread the word about the benefits of reduced emissions."

Audi also has produced a You Tube video, Truth in Diesel.

Clean diesels are German technology -- not surprising, since Rudolph Diesel was a German engineer who worked with a guy named Gottlieb Daimler. Merceces-Benz and Volkswagen also have diesel models that are emission-approved in all 50 US states. In fact, the VW Jetta TDI was named Green Car of the Year at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November 2008.

For the related video provided at Youtube, Click on the link below:

Audi partners with Facebook

source: www.examiner.com

Protection Sought Again for Giant, Spitting Worms

2009-07-01T12:10:00.002+05:30

Fans of the giant Palouse earthworm are once again seeking federal protection for the rare, sweet-smelling species that spits at predators.

They filed a petition Tuesday with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requesting the worm be protected as an endangered species.

''The giant Palouse earthworm is critically endangered and needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act to have any chance of survival,'' said Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.

The center filed the lawsuit along with Friends of the Clearwater, Palouse Prairie Foundation, Palouse Audubon and Palouse Group of Sierra Club.

The worm has been seen only four reported times in the past 110 years, but supporters contend it is still present in the Palouse, a region of about 2 million acres of rolling wheat fields near the Idaho-Washington border south of Spokane.

Decades of intense agriculture and urban sprawl have wiped out much of the worm's habitat, said Steve Paulson with Friends of the Clearwater. Only about 2 percent of the Palouse prairie remains in a native state, he said.

The worm can reach 3 feet in length, is white in color and reportedly possesses a unique lily smell, said Greenwald, who is based in Portland, Ore. It is the largest and longest-lived earthworm in North America.

During the Bush administration, the agency rejected a similar petition from the groups, saying there was not enough scientific information about the species to prove it needed protection. The groups hope to have better luck with the Obama administration.

''We no longer have an administration adamantly opposed to protecting species,'' Greenwald said. The latest petition includes new research the groups hope proves the worm is rare and threatened, he said.

Doug Zimmer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle said they had not seen the petition and could not comment on its merits. ''It's always good to see new information and good science on any species,'' Zimmer said.

In 1897, the giant Palouse earthworm was described as ''very abundant'' in the region, but sightings are rare. The last confirmed sighting was made on May 27, 2005, by a University of Idaho researcher. Before that, the worm had not been seen since 1988.

Most earthworms found in the Northwest originated in Europe, arriving on plants or in soil shipped to the New World. The giant Palouse earthworm is one of the few native species.

In previously rejecting endangered species protection, the Fish and Wildlife Service said there was too little information in the scientific record. That prevented the assessment of population trends.

The agency concluded that while the Palouse prairie has experienced a dramatic conversion of native habitat to agriculture, it was not clear if that hurt the worm. The agency also found no information on predation or transmission of pathogens by other earthworms to the giant Palouse earthworm.

For related article click on the link below:

On the Web

A Breakthrough in finding Genetic Mutation to Decode Cancers

2009-06-16T12:10:00.005+05:30

Genetic Mutation can be defined as , Changes in the nucleotide sequence of the genetic material (i.e. DNA, or RNA, in the case of viruses), which are usually caused by copying errors during replication that further lead to base substitution, insertion, or deletion of one or more base pairs.

A group of Vancouver doctors and scientists is receiving international recognition after making a breakthrough cancer discovery that could lead to new cancer diagnostics and treatments.

The team, which included more than 40 people from the BC Cancer Agency and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, discovered that a single genetic mutation is responsible for granulosa cell tumours, a rare and often untreatable form of ovarian cancer.

The discovery is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, as there are three billion components to the genetic code of the tumour.

But the research, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, can be applied to more than ovarian cancer.

State-of-the-art technology used to identify the single mutation in ovarian cancer's DNA can also be used to unravel the genetic sequences of other cancers.

"What we can do is completely decode cancers," said Dr. David Huntsman, a genetic pathologist at the BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver General Hospital and the University of B.C.

"This would have been completely unfathomable two years ago. If you had suggested doing it, people would have looked at you like you had said you were going to fly to the moon without a rocket."

Huntsman said the ability to decode the genetic sequences of specific cancers will be part of a road map to truly personalized medicine, in which doctors will be able to come up with an individualized "recipe" for every patient.

"At some point we have to start recognizing that every patient is different in the way they respond not only to their disease, but the way they respond to and handle the treatment," Huntsman said.

More health news can be found at www.vancouversun.com/health

and the exclusive video for this article is available, click on the following link to get it.

Dr. James Mackay on cancer and genetics

Indian Politics - A Family Affair

2009-06-13T20:39:00.001+05:30

The Indian parliament is full of relatives – more than ever before. Mothers and sons, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, third-generation stars, wives, widows, in-laws, uncles and nephews. Has democracy become a monarchy by other means?

Over a decade ago, when standards of behaviour in the Indian parliament were nose-diving – what with acrimony, physical demonstrations, unparliamentary language, personal attacks and constant shrill bickering, a perpetual partisan divide and even occasional exchange of physical blows becoming the order of the day – former Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee wished that Indian politics would live up to the age-old ideal of vasudhaika kutumbikam ("all the universe is a family"). Today it seems that his wish has come true, and with a vengeance.

The biggest winner of the recent Lok Sabha elections was not the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) but rather the dynasty; a belief that democracy is and should be monarchy through other means. Every leader, sans party, beyond ideological divide, beyond left, right or centre, of communalism or secularism, is a votary of family rule, whose parliamentary seats are part of the family's estate.

Relatives thrive in the Indian parliament today. Two mother-son sets, all four from one family – Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and Maneka and Varun Gandhi – from Congress and BJP respectively are divided on every other possible issue but still united in leading the family's hold over political power.

Then there are four father-son sets. Ajit Singh and Jayant Chaudhary (Ajit's father, Charan Singh, was a former prime minister); HD Deve Gowda and HD Kumaraswamy (Gowda is a former prime minister, while his son was chief minister of Karnataka); Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav (Singh was former defence minister and UP chief minister); and Adhikari Sisir Kumar and Adhikari Suvendu.

In all, 27 MPs in Lok Sabha today belong to prominent political families: sons, daughters, siblings, wives, cousins, nephews – highlighting the Indian political family business power, where parliamentary seats are heirlooms to be passed on.

In contrast, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar – ever a champion of empowering women – has her daughter, Supriya Sule, as a parliamentary colleague, while Farooq Abdullah (former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir) will share treasury benches with son-in-law Sachin Pilot, and Abdullah's son, Omar Abdullah, rules Jammu and Kashmir as chief minister. Incidentally, Pilot is son of the late Congress leader, Rajesh Pilot.

Another family who can give a run for their money is the Karunanidhis, in Tamil Nadu. Old man Karunanidhi, chief minister at 82, with three wives, has made eldest son Alagiri and nephew Dayanidhi Maran ministers in the central cabinet, while son Stalin was made deputy chief minister in Tamil Nadu and daughter Kanimozhi has to make do with a merely being a member of the Rajya Sabha (Indian parliament).

The fountainhead of this tendency was the reign of three generations of Nehru-Gandhis; Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv Gandhi as prime ministers. While Rajiv's widow, an Italian, Sonia (nee Manio) Gandhi refused prime ministership owing to sustained opposition by the BJP, her son Rahul is waiting to take over the mantle.

Chieftains and warlords have emulated that model across the nation. Some of the great Indian political families include Badals of Punjab, Yadavs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Thackerays and Pawars in Maharashtra, Patnaiks in Orissa and Reddys in Andhra Pradesh.

There have been times when the death of popular leaders like MG Ramachandran or NT Rama Rao led to an open war of succession with widows, mistresses, son-in-laws, sons and second wives all fighting for their legacy. But today, like well managed corporations; families tend to handle their succession in a more orderly way.

A contrasting aspect is some unmarried and family-less leaders who have succeeded in India – Abdul Kalam, Vajpayee, J Jayalalitha, Mayawati, Mamata Benarjee, Narendra Modi – but no one knows if they will remain an exception or even prove to be a dying breed. In any case, they have shown little inclination to take up the cause of institutionalizing merit over family.

Several families, like the Scindias, Thackerays and Nandamuris, have spread across parties. Bal Thackeray's nephew, Raj, broke-up with cousin Udhav after a bitter succession war and started the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena party. Agatha Sangma, a young ministerial face in the Congress-led UPA government, is the daughter of former Lok Sabha Speaker PA Sangma, who led an anti-Sonia campaign. Central minister D Purandareswari, daughter of Telugu Desam party founder NT Rama Rao, and husband D Venkateshwara Rao (Andhra Pradesh state assembly) are with Congress, while her brother-in-law N Chandrababu Naidu and other brothers are in control of the TDP.

The erstwhile royal family of Scindia had the most famous feud of them all, where old mother Rajamate was a key leader of the BJP while her son, Madhavrao, was a senior Congress leader. After their deaths, Madhavrao's son, Jyotiraditya, became part of the Rahul Gandhi brigade in Congress while Madhavrao's sister, Vasundhara Raje, was chief minister of Rajasthan leading the BJP government.

Miera Kumar, the first woman and Dalit to be elected Speaker of Lok Sabha, still would not have made it were she also not daughter of former deputy prime minister Jagjivan Ram.

Family power in politics is nothing new to south Asia, where dynasties like the Gandhis and Bhuttos and Hasinas have held clout for generations. But with family name more important in politics than individual qualities or merits in India, it strikes at the very core of democracy. Grassroots activists and student leaders with no patronage matter little, and given the huge money and muscle power involved in elections, non-family upstarts can only dream of power from the sidelines. In fact, its impact goes beyond politics, with the reign of dynasties extending to most businesses, even Bollywood.

Hail the Great Indian Political Family! Jai Ho!

Child Poverty Due to become Past

2009-06-12T11:30:00.002+05:30

Ministers are making it a legal duty for the government, local authorities and other organisations to help to end child poverty across the UK.

The government looks set to miss its own targets on cutting the numbers of children living in poverty.

A new bill being published later will make it a duty to support families so that child poverty is eradicated by 2020, the goal set by Tony Blair.

Campaigners say this means future governments cannot easily drop the aim.

The latest figures available, for 2007/8, put the number of children living in poverty at 2.9 million.

Poverty in this case is measured relatively - those who live in households with an income of less than 60% of the average.

Since Tony Blair set the target of ending child poverty by 2020, the government says it has lifted half a million children out of poverty, down from 3.4 million in 1999.

The then prime minister also set a target to halve the numbers of children in poverty by 2010 - but that looks unlikely to be met.

Ministers say measures taken since the 2007 Budget will move another 500,000 children out of poverty, but that will still leave 2.4 million in that position.

Strategy

Under the Child Poverty Bill, a legal duty to work together to support families to end child poverty will be placed on central government, councils and services including the police, NHS primary care trusts and youth offending agencies.

It requires the Westminster government to publish a UK-wide child poverty strategy, which must be revised every three years.

It also puts the same duty on Scottish and Northern Irish ministers.

It sets out four targets to be met by 2020 across the UK, which the government says will "define the eradication of poverty".

These include having fewer than 10% of children living in relative low income poverty (i.e. in households with less than 60% of average).

The bill will also establish a child poverty commission to advise on strategies to tackle child poverty.

The main ways the government tries to move children's families out of poverty include changes to the tax and benefits system, including tax credits, and a wider approach to raising skills and closing the education achievement gap between rich and poor.

Providing better housing and children's centres such as Sure Start are also part of the drive.

'Big challenge'

Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper said: "This bill is about giving every child a fair chance in life.

"I want a society where children don't miss out on school trips, aren't stuck in poor housing with no space to do their homework and aren't left behind because they don't have a computer or internet access.

"This is a big challenge, and one which we will not shy away from. It holds current and future government's feet to the flames and won't allow any government to quietly forget about child poverty or walk away."

But Conservative spokeswoman for work and pensions Theresa May said the pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 was "just one of countless Labour promises that lays in tatters".

"It is a tragedy that the number of children falling into the poverty cycle is continuing to rise," she said.

"The government needs to wake up and get a grip of this problem. Simply relying on means-tested benefits to address the symptoms of poverty is unsustainable. Instead we must tackle the root causes of poverty, such as educational failure, family breakdown, drug abuse, indebtedness and crime."

The Child Poverty Action Group said the new bill was a "major step in the fight to end Britian's child poverty shame".

The group's chief executive, Kate Green said: "You rarely see such high levels of child poverty as we have in the UK in other wealthy countries and that is clearly wrong.

"We must stop so many of our children growing up with worse health, poor life chances and a lower life expectancy.

"The bill will mean action on child poverty is no longer optional for future governments, it will be mandatory."

source: BBC News

Global Climate Change

2009-06-11T12:32:00.003+05:30

I have been arguing against man made global warming since I started writing articles. I have not changed my mind one iota and have even become more convinced than ever. This last week, it hit the fan again and the the power of large grants for research again flexed it’s muscle.

NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, told a National Public Radio (NPR) interviewer that he was not sure global warming was something we should be worrying about. He said that he had no doubt that a trend of global warming exists but that he did not believe it was something we should be worried about.

Now, after some of the ones with influence have gotten hold on Mr. Griffin, he has apologized! He has not recanted, only apologized for mentioning it. Read his statement from the Associated Press:

"Unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it."

"All I can really do is apologize to all you guys ... I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this," he said

This hit the headlines like a nuclear explosion. I had already read somewhere that NASA had about decided that global warming was indeed a result of the solar activity rather than man.

The atmospheric temperature has been dropping now for a full decade due to the lack of solar activity and most scientists not on the grants payroll, have long since argued that this is simply another of the regular cycles of temperature change. Yet, the "Chicken Little" mentality continues to drive the populace into believing the sky is falling.

Numerous highly ranked scientists have already signed a gigantic petition indicating their opposition to the man-made climate change theory. But those who are under humongous grants for their investigating this natural phenomena keep blistering the public with their stupid theory that a slight increase in carbon dioxide particles are causing it. The tiny increase in the carbon, which is a tiny portion of the atmospheric makeup could never cause such a thing as global warming. They know it. They just want to milk it for all it’s worth and there are plenty of gullible people to yell the sky is falling to give a semblance of credence to their nonsense.

Now, don’t tell me that a large amount of pressure was not put on Mr. Griffin simply because he was being honest. This nation, as most of the other nations of the world, is presently in a financial crunch that may prove to massive from which to recover. Yet, for those who are getting fat from this ruse have taken it so far as to cause us and most of the world, to go even deeper into debt to try and fight off this natural cycling of temperature which has been up and down since any records have been kept. This should be a criminal offense and people, such as Al Gore and other outspoken, jet traveling polluters should be prosecuted for having promulgated this farce.

The U.N. has bought into this charade as a ruse to invoke a world-wide taxation to fight this imaginary enemy. And guess who will carry the burden of taxation? Guess who will be forced to reduce their emissions most of anyone in the world? There is no guessing to do. It is a foregone conclusion that the U.S. Will be expected to carry the load when we are not able to carry our own load. It is time our politicians woke up and paid attention to some of these honest scientists who "slip up" and tell it like it is, only to face the possibility of being cast out of the "society".

This is an Article by: Joel Hendon, Birmingham Biblical Examiner.

Return of the Whale hunters

2009-06-11T11:59:00.008+05:30

(video is available at the end of this article)

Killing that which you love is one of the more discomforting human failings; especially when it comes to animals.

As last week's mass stranding on a Cape Town beach demonstrates, whales and dolphins exert a particularly powerful hold on the public imagination.

The 55 false killer whales (not pilot whales, as was widely reported in the press) beached themselves at Kommetjie, floundering helplessly on the sand.

Attempts to save them were hampered by well intentioned amateurs.

Even the humane decision taken to euthanise the animals was threatened by members of the public who insisted on futile efforts to “rescue” the whales.

Nan Rice of the Dolphin Action and Protection organisation told the South African Times: “I think it's disgusting. It makes me sick. You can't be sentimental, you have to be serious.

The public get hysterical and start acting like prima donnas and throw themselves on the beach and have to be carried away by the police.”

Emotions run high on the subject of cetaceans (the scientific name for the suborder of whales and dolphins).

Perhaps it's a sense of collective guilt — our relationship with these animals has been bloody ever since the first harpoon was thrown.

Reconciling centuries of whaling with a few decades of whale-loving isn't easy.

Having spent eight years watching and writing about whales, I've come to the conclusion that our shared history is destined to remain troubled.

Now new evidence has emerged to underline that conviction.

In the award-winning documentary, The Cove, which stunned audiences at this year's Sundance Festival, and is due for release later this summer, director Louie Psihoyos uses covert filming to uncover Japan's dirty little secret: the annual slaughter of 23,000 dolphins.

In whale terms, Japan has long been a pariah. It exploits a loophole in the 1986 international moratorium on whaling to carry on “scientific research” in the Pacific and Southern Oceans.

Sailing into areas officially declared as whale sanctuaries, its fleet catches thousands of minke and fin whales each year.

Grenades are shot into the crania of their prey; some animals may take hours to die. Rather than furnishing data for scientific experiments, they end up as whale sushi and whale burgers.

Last year, the Japanese proposed to start hunting humpbacks. These are exquisite animals.

I've been watching them in the waters off Cape Cod for years and never fail to be amazed at their beauty and amused at their antics.

It is impossible not to smile when a 50-ton, 50-foot whale launches itself out of the water before your eyes.

Selecting these crowd-pleasers as their latest target was a provocative act; the Japanese must have known it would arouse the ire of the eco-warriors of Sea Shepherd.

Under the command of their Canadian captain, Paul Watson, and funded by well-wishers (including the rock group the Red Hot Chili Peppers), these cetacean avengers have put themselves on the front line of the “whale wars”.

Last year, two of their crew were accused of piracy when they boarded a whale-catcher to deliver their protest in person.

The Japanese call them terrorists, others see them as heroes.

The Cove is set to raise the temperature of an already heated debate to new highs.

Unlike its whaling fleet sailing in remote seas, the Japanese dolphin harvest is carried out on its coastline, within sight of its citizens.

Aware of the negative publicity, the authorities erect huge blue tarpaulin screens across narrow inlets to prevent filming as dolphins are driven to their deaths.

Nevertheless, The Cove has managed to sneak through this curtain of shame. What it reveals is horrifying.

Most of the mammals killed are destined for human consumption, misleadingly labelled as whale meat (rather than dolphin). But some are taken alive.

Only animals which show the most defiance — by leaping highest — are spared for sale to dolphinaria.

It is an inexcusable trade, and I urge anyone who cares about these animals to protest to the Japanese government.

Yet there are other factors to consider in this issue of inter-species morality.

Apart from the fact that whaling continues in Norway, where whale-watching tourists have been aghast to see the very animals they are observing being harpooned by whalers, Europe also hosts its own little-known whale cull.

In the Faroes — North Sea islands under Danish and therefore EU jurisdiction — up to 1,000 pilot whales are slaughtered each year during the grindadráp, a communal hunt that dates back to the islanders' Viking roots.

Pilot whales are named for their propensity to follow a leader, a loyalty that their human pursuers exploit.

Pods of whales are forced into shallow waters which turn red with blood as the animals' necks are severed with sharp knives.

Their meat is then divided up among the islanders; young children wander the harbourside carrying bleeding chunks of whale in carrier bags. (In November 2008, Faroese authorities declared the meat inedible, due to the intake of toxic PCBs. Much of Japanese whale meat may be similarly contaminated.)

In the Faroes, as in Japan, the defence is that these are long-held traditions.

The Japanese counter that in North America, the Inuit are allowed to hunt bowhead whales, far rarer than their own prey. They have a point.

Bowheads are the longest-living animals on earth: in the 1990s, Bowheads were found to have 200-year-old Inuit harpoons imbedded in their blubber, making the animals themselves even older.

There are other historical considerations. At the end of the Second World War, after the atomic bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the decommissioned Japanese navy was converted into a whaling fleet by the Allied powers, so the defeated and starving nation could feed itself.

Since Japan was encouraged and even assisted in whaling by the West — whale was served in schools until the 1970s — it irks to be lectured on the subject.

“It's not because Japanese want to eat whale meat,” Ayako Okubo of the Ocean Policy Research Foundation told theNew York Times recently.

“It's because they don't like being told not to eat it by foreigners.”

Indeed, some Americans contest that it was their own over-use of pressure and the moral weight of the environmental lobby that pushed Japan into its stubborn position.

At next week's annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Madeira, pragmatic conservationists will argue that the Japanese should be allowed to take minke whales (numerous enough for their hunters to call them “cockroaches of the sea”) in their own waters, thereby relieving the pressure of their unrestricted whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Japan has already signalled its disapproval of the idea; a new battle looms.

Meanwhile, the West congratulates itself on having banned whaling long ago.

Yet if it wasn't for the fact that America, which pioneered modern whaling in the 18th century, had given up the industry for entirely commercial reasons at the beginning of the 20th century, there would have been no international moratorium.

By then, whales had outlived their uses for the burgeoning American empire, which no longer needed whale oil to light its cities and lubricate its industries.

Its attentions had fixed on mineral oil, discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, and all the attendant geo-political strife it caused.

Yet whales were even conscripted into those global wars.

Nitroglycerine derived from whales was used in explosives in the First World War.

Trench foot was treated using whale oil. Later, nuclear submarines were designed to the hydrodynamics demonstrated by whales, themselves natural sub–marines: sperm whales can dive for two miles and stay down for up to two hours in their search for squid.

Even the space race found a use for whales. Sperm whale oil does not freeze in sub-zero temperatures, making it perfect for use by Nasa.

As I write this, the space probe Voyager and the Hubble telescope are spinning in space, lubricated by whales.

Killer whales and dolphins were trained by the military to plant underwater mines.

In Vietnam, dolphins were employed as assassins, injecting enemy divers with lethal doses of carbon dioxide.

Dolphins were also used in both Gulf Wars — to what extent, or in what capacity, remains an official secret.

Britain cannot claim innocence on this score. We were still a whaling nation in the 1960s. Up until the mid-19th century, London itself was a whaling port.

At Greenwich and Rotherhithe, on quays now overlooked by modern apartment blocks, bits of whale brought back from Greenland once lay.

The site of the Millennium Dome was a whale-rendering plant — tactfully situated out of olfactory range of the capital.

London's whaling past is also remembered in Whalebone Lane, Dagenham, once the site of an arch constructed from the jawbones of a Right whale that foundered in the Thames in 1658 and which was promptly slaughtered.

Other cetacean visitors to London have been little better treated.

In 1793, a 30-foot killer whale found itself subject of “an exciting chase” after it was harpooned, towing its hunters at speed up and down the Thames.

In 1842, a minke whale dawdling off Deptford was set upon by five sailors.

Armed with a “large bearded spear”, they attacked “the monster”, which “soon showed symptoms of weakness, and threw up large quantities of water from the blowing apertures on its back”. Its carcase ended up on display outside a butcher's shop.

Nineteenth-century London was fond of such sensation.

In 1831, a giant wooden hut was erected in Trafalgar Square, wherein the skeleton of a massive blue whale was set up, to the delight of Londoners who paid a shilling to quaff wine while wandering within the leviathan's ribs.

In 1864, an entire preserved fin whale was exhibited in a shed in Shoreditch behind Liverpool Street station.

And at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster in 1877, a live beluga whale captured off Labrador languished in an iron tank measuring just six feet deep.

Even then it was clear that these were not exactly ideal conditions.

Thomas Claughton, the controversial Bishop of St Albans, complained the whale was “the creature of which the Psalmist speaks as placed in its element by the Great Creator”; it was not man's right to take him out of it.

The Times correctly predicted the hapless mammal's demise, adding: “Should he succumb to the unfavourable conditions of life in this city, his coat will make porpoise-skin boots.”

Even more extraordinary was the fact that a dolphin stranded at Battersea Bridge in 1918 was summarily eaten by the Natural History Museum's staff and their “distinguished correspondents” at a Mansion House banquet.

“The opinions received afterwards were nearly all favourable, and some of them enthusiastic,” reported Professor Sidney Harmer.

Contrast such historical fates with that of the whale which swam up the Thames in January 2006.

As the whale, a Northern Bottlenose, grew weak from stress and dehydration, its plight garnered international media coverage.

Its final passing, borne down river on a rubber bier, was greeted with the kind of solemnity accorded to a head of state.

Now its skeleton lies in the Natural History Museum — along with its amputated dorsal fin squashed into a glass jar.

Perhaps most surreal of all the capital's whalish tales, however, is that of the dolphins of Oxford Street.

In 1971 the London Dolphinarium, a bizarre striptease club, opened at 65 Oxford Street, complete with scantily-clad “aquamaids”.

Remnants of its blue-painted tank can still be seen in a cellar off Soho Square.

The dolphinarium was run by a company called Pleasureama, whose “sole object”, announced its chairman, Sir Harmar Nicholls, MP, was “to make a profit for its shareholders”.

It lasted less than two years. Nevertheless, in 1974 Paul Raymond opened a Soho revue for which dolphins were trained to undo showgirls' bras.

Protests closed it down after six weeks. Not even world-weary Londoners could countenance such an outrage in the new age of “Save the Whale”.

They might be surprised to learn that 40 years later that time has come again.

source:www.thisislondon.co.uk

Watch the exclusive video regarding this issue:

Video on Return of the Whale hunters

Green Mystery

2009-06-10T12:02:00.000+05:30

In a greenhouse in Beltsville, Maryland, Steve Britz aims light-emitting diodes at rows of plants, hoping to coax more color out of the leaves. In a lab in Pomona, California, David Still painstakingly manipulates plants' genetic structure, then analyzes their progeny.

The two have a common goal: to build a better head of lettuce. Specifically, Britz, a research plant physiologist with the US Department of Agriculture's research unit, and Still, a professor of horticulture and plant and soil science at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, seek to create varieties of lettuce that contain more antioxidants.

Antioxidants are darlings of the nutrition world, valued for their purported health-promoting and disease- busting qualities. But even as Britz and Still toil away, neither is sure antioxidants are all they're cracked up to be.

The body's daily functions, such as metabolizing food, and its exposure to such environmental hazards as pollution, produce stray molecules known as free radicals, which can oxidize, or interact with oxygen molecules, and damage cells.

Antioxidants can engage the free radicals before they do harm. Each antioxidant, from the anthocyanins and caretenoids to isoflavones and lutein, is thought to protect against a certain kind of cell damage. Ascorbic acid and lycopene are thought to reduce DNA damage, while flavonoids are believed to reduce the production of free radicals in the first place, and phenolics may slow heart disease.

One of the great mysteries about antioxidants is whether they can work in isolation or whether their efficacy depends on their interactions with one another and perhaps with other substances.

Another is whether they can do harm: recent research showing that vitamins C and E, taken as supplements, may reduce the health benefits of exercise has cast a pall on antioxidant supplements.

And there's a third mystery: is the disease-fighting capacity of fruits and vegetables directly attributable to antioxidants, or is it based on some other qualities or compounds in these foods?

Victoria Drake, a research associate at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, said: "We know that antioxidant-rich foods can reduce the risk of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases. But evidence that very high doses of individual micronutrients or phytochemicals can do the same is inconsistent and relatively weak. A healthy diet is key; supplements should be used only as 'nutritional insurance.'"

A study in the May 29 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics raises the intriguing question of whether our bodies might benefit from some exposure to free radicals. Trey Ideker, who holds posts in the schools of medicine and engineering at the University of California at San Diego, has found in laboratory tests that limited exposure to oxidants may equip cells to better withstand larger exposures.

Most of the evidence on which antioxidants' reputation is based comes from studies of isolated cells exposed to plant chemicals or from research on rats and mice. While much of the research is compelling, none of it shows how antioxidants actually affect human health.

In any case, Britz and Still both observe that while we have a hunch that antioxidants are good for us, in fact they're not clearly essential to our health. "They're not like vitamins," Britz notes. "They're not necessary in that you don't get a deficiency response if you don't have them."

Yet both continue their work with lettuce, believing that it might lead to development of plants whose high levels of antioxidants may help them grow better and withstand the degradations of shipping and storage.

And altering green lettuce's colors by bumping up the antioxidants might make for a prettier plant. "If the lettuce is more attractive," Briz mused, "people might eat more of it - and less of things that are bad for them."

Source- The Washington Post

Protest against Racism

2009-06-10T11:33:00.001+05:30

INDIAN students have protested against racist attacks, calling on the Federal Government stop treating them like "cash cows".

Hundreds of Indian students and supporters rallied at Sydney Town Hall and marched to Hyde Park this afternoon, calling for an end to violence and inequality.

The young Indian men and woman delivered passionate speeches about being bashed and robbed, claiming police and other authorities were ignoring their plight.

They also called for Australia's education and immigration policy to be overhauled so overseas students are protected from dodgy landlords and employers and receive the same benefits as domestic students.

The gathering follows a rally in Melbourne in late May of 2000 demonstrators from the Indian community after a series of recent attacks, including two stabbings.

Student and part-time taxi driver Navjot Singh told the Sydney rally he was recently slashed across the face with a knife.

He implored police to do more to protect foreign students, saying racist attacks occurred on a regular basis in areas of Sydney with large Indian populations.

"There are thousands of people, thousands of Indians - international students every day robbed at Harris Park (railway) station," he said.

"We are just talking peacefully, nothing else but peacefully. Go and do your duty at Harris Park station.

"Go there, patrol that area - make it safe, make it safe, for God's sake, make it safe!"

National Union of Students president David Barrow told the rally that government policy toward foreign students was discriminatory.

"For too long, the education sector and the government have treated international students like cash cows, not like human beings," Mr Barrow said.

He said overseas university student fees were rising, landlords and employers were taking advantage of them and they couldn't survive under visas limits of a maximum of 20 hours of work a week.

"It is not acceptable to have 10 or 15 students crammed into an apartment being charged $150 a week (each)," Mr Barrow said.

"And we know that there are bosses out there who say to international students `you work 30 hours a week and we're going to pay you under the minimum wage'."

Rashmi Kumar, president of the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association, echoed Mr Barrow's sentiments.

"Now we can stand together, domestic and international students - all together, to try and get an education that's not based on exploitation, on racism, on violence and discrimination," she said at the rally.

Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said every NSW resident deserved the same protection under the law.

"Whether it's someone of Indian background or someone of any other nationality, we need to ensure police properly respond to attacks upon citizens in our suburbs," Mr O'Farrell told reporters.

STORY

Global Issues

2009-06-09T20:59:00.004+05:30

Global Dimming

Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.

Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflective. More of the sun’s heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.

This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming.

Impacts Of Global Dimming: Millions Already Killed By It?

Global warming results from the greenhouse effect caused by, amongst other things, excessive amounts of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. It would seem then, that the other by-products which cause global dimming may be an ironic savior.

A deeper look at this, however, shows that unfortunately this is not the case.

Health And Environmental Effects

The pollutants that lead to global dimming also lead to various human and environmental problems, such as smog, respiratory problems, and acid rain.

The impacts of global dimming itself, however, can be devastating.

Millions From Famines In The Sahel In The 70s And 80s

The death toll that global dimming may have already caused is thought to be massive.

Climatologists studying this phenomenon believe that the reflection of heat have made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. As a result, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa.

In the 1970s and 1980s, massive famines were caused by failed rains which climatologists had never quite understood why they had failed.

The answers that global dimming models seemed to provide, the documentary noted, has led to a chilling conclusion: “what came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations [from Europe and North America] contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa, and afflicted 50 million more” with hunger and starvation.

Billions Are Likely To Be Affected In Asia From Similar Effects

Scientists said that the impact of global dimming might not be in the millions, but billions. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the world’s population. If this air pollution and global dimming has a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoons some 3 billion people could be affected.

As Well As Fossil Fuel Burning, Contrails Is Another Source

Contrails (the vapor from planes flying high in the sky) were seen as another significant cause of heat reflection.

During the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, all commercial flights were grounded for the next three days.

This allowed climate scientists to look at the effect on the climate when there were no contrails and no heat reflection.

What scientists found was that the temperature rose by some 1 degree centigrade in that period of 3 days.

Global Dimming Is Hiding The True Power Of Global Warming

The above impacts of global dimming have led to fears that global dimming has been hiding the true power of global warming.

Currently, most climate change models predict a 5 degrees increase in temperature over the next century, which is already considered extremely grave. However, global dimming has led to an underestimation of the power of global warming.

Addressing Global Dimming Only Will Lead To Massive Global Warming

Global dimming can be dealt with by cleaning up emissions.

However, if global dimming problems are only addressed, then the effects of global warming will increase even more. This may be what happened to Europe in 2003.

In Europe, various measures have been taken in recent years to clean up the emissions to reduce pollutants that create smog and other problems, but without reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in parallel. This seems to have had a few effects:

This may have already lessened the severity of droughts and failed rains in the Sahel.

However, it seems that it may have caused, or contributed to, the European heat wave in 2003 that killed thousands in France, saw forest fires in Portugal, and caused many other problems throughout the continent.

The documentary noted that the impacts of addressing global dimming only would increase global warming more rapidly. Irreversible damage would be only about 30 years away. Global level impacts would include:

The melting of ice in Greenland, which would lead to more rising sea levels. This in turn would impact many of our major world cities

Drying tropical rain forests would increase the risk of burning. This would release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further increasing global warming effects. (Some countries have pushed for using “carbon sinks” to count as part of their emission targets. This has already been controversial because these store carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere when burnt. Global dimming worries increase these concerns even more.)

These and other effects could combine to lead to an increase of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature over the next 100 years, not the standard 5 degrees which most models currently predict.

This would be a more rapid warming than any other time in history, the documentary noted. With such an increase,

Vegetation will die off even more quickly

Soil erosion will increase and food production will fail

A Sahara type of climate could be possible in places such as England, while other parts of the world would fare even worse.

Such an increase in temperature would also release one of the biggest stores of greenhouse gases on earth, methane hydrate, currently contained at the bottom of the earth’s oceans and known to destabilize with warming. This gas is eight times stronger than carbon dioxide in its greenhouse effect. As the documentary also added, due to the sheer amounts that would be released, by this time, whatever we would try to curb emissions, it would be too late.

“This is not a prediction,” the documentary said, “it is a warning of what will happen if we clean up the pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse gases.”

Root Causes Of Global Warming Also Must Be Addressed

If we were to use global dimming pollutants to stave off the effects of global warming, we would still face many problems, such as:

Human health problems from the soot/smog

Environmental problems such as acid rain

Ecological problems such as changes in rainfall patterns (as the Ethiopian famine example above reminds us) which can kill millions, if not billions.

Climatologists are stressing that the roots of both global dimming causing pollutants and global warming causing greenhouse gases have to be dealt with together and soon.

We may have to change our way of life, the documentary warned. While this has been a message for over 20 years, as part of the climate change concerns, little has actually been done. “Rapidly,” the documentary concluded, “we are running out of time.”

2009-06-03T12:55:00.008+05:30

Time for Earth Warriors

June 5 is World Environment Day and this year the theme is Your Planet Need You – Unite to combat Climate Change. How can you help to change the environment?

Pesticide residue has been found in regions as far away as the Antarctica, rubbish (tin containers, tins, food scraps, medicine, human waste, used oxygen cylinders, plastic) litters the approaches to Mt. Everest, the Amazon jungle is shrinking , national parks have no sudden dangers, our seas are dying, the air is grossly polluted … the list goes on. And at home, we don’t worry about using multi-colored chemical concoctions to leave the toilet sparkling clean (when there are environment friendly alternatives such as vinegar) or pesticide-laced insect repellents. We find using public transport a trouble and hardly give a thought to getting our vehicles checked for emission control … These are just some of the examples of how are hurting the earth.

World Environment Day or Earth Day?

The equinoctial Earth Day, also International Earth Day, is celebrated on the vernal equinox to mark the beginning of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. The United Nations celebrates Earth Day each year on the vernal equinox (around March 21). There is also Earth Day (April 22), which is to highlight popular (American) political support for an environmental agenda. And finally, the United Nations, under the U.N. Environment Programme, has observed World Environment Day ( sometimes called Earth Day) on June 5 since 1972.

Unite to fight

The day when we are supposed think about the state of the environment is fast approaching. Observed every year on June 5, World Environment Day (WED) was established by the UN General Assembly in 1972 to make it clear that people are the key to looking at and providing answers to environmental issues. The theme for this year is “Your Planet Needs You- UNite to combat Climate change”. It also looks at fighting poverty and forest management. This year’s host is Mexico, which is playing an important role in the “Billion Tree Campaign” being planned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). In this plan, Mexico plans to plant at least 25 percent of the seven billion trees. So, some steps are being taken to help save the environment. The World Environment Day (WED) alphabet (This has been released by the UNEP). Many of them are easy to implement, so go ahead and help make things easier for Planet Earth.

Join up

Are you interested in community activities like tree planting, poster contest, open house quiz and screening a documentary on climate change and so on?

Then visit the following link I have given below

http://www.unep.org/wed/2009/english/content/asia_pacific.asp

This year will see the launch of a plan called the “Climate Heroes” – individuals who will take up projects to show us the way of how to reduce our carbon footprint, fight waste and the need to recycle, and highlight the importance of planting trees.

Their websites are:

www.rozsavage.com,

www.theplastiki.com,

www.japanbikeride.com,

www.projectkaisei.org,

(Some of these will be tracked on Google Earth, as they involve adventure)

Information Please

2009-06-03T12:52:00.001+05:30

When I was quite young, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother used to talk to it.

Then I discovered that somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person - her name was Information Please and there was nothing she did not know. Information Please could supply anybody's number and the correct time.

My first personal experience with this genie-in-the-bottle came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn't seem to be any reason in crying because there was no one home to give sympathy. I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway - The telephone! Quickly I ran for the footstool in the parlor and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up I unhooked the receiver in the parlor and held it to my ear. Information Please I said into the mouthpiece just above my head.

A click or two and a small clear voice spoke into my ear. "Information."

"I hurt my finger. . ." I wailed into the phone. The tears came readily enough now that I had an audience.

"Isn't your mother home?" came the question.

"Nobody's home but me." I blubbered.

"Are you bleeding?"

"No," I replied. "I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts."

"Can you open your icebox?" she asked. I said I could. "Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it to your finger."

After that I called Information Please for everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was. She helped me with my math, and she told me my pet chipmunk I had caught in the park just the day before would eat fruits and nuts.

And there was the time that Petey, our pet canary died. I called Information Please and told her the sad story. She listened, then said the usual things grown-ups say to soothe a child. But I was unconsoled. Why is it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to all families, only to end up as a heap of feathers, feet up on the bottom of a cage?

She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, "Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in."

Somehow I felt better.

Another day I was on the telephone. "Information Please."

"Information," said the now familiar voice.

"How do you spell fix?" I asked.

All this took place in a small town in the pacific Northwest. Then when I was 9 years old, we moved across the country to Boston. I missed my friend very much. Information Please belonged in that old wooden box back home, and I somehow never thought of trying the tall, shiny new phone that sat on the hall table.

Yet as I grew into my teens, the memories of those childhood conversations never really left me; often in moments of doubt and perplexity I would recall the serene sense of security I had then. I appreciated now how patient, understanding, and kind she was to have spent her time on a little boy.

A few years later, on my way west to college, my plane put down in Seattle. I had about half an hour or so between plane, and I spent 15 minutes or so on the phone with my sister, who lived there now. Then without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown operator and said, "Information Please".

Miraculously, I heard again the small, clear voice I knew so well, "Information." I hadn't planned this but I heard myself saying, "Could you tell me please how-to spell fix?'

There was a long pause. Then came the soft spoken answer, "I guess that your finger must have healed by now."

I laughed, "So it's really still you, I said. "I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time."

"I wonder, she said, if you know how much your calls meant to me. I never had any children, and I used to look forward to your calls."

I told her how often I had thought of her over the years and I asked if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister.

"Please do, just ask for Sally."

Just three months later I was back in Seattle. . .A different voice answered Information and I asked for Sally.

"Are you a friend?" "Yes, a very old friend." "Then I'm sorry to have to tell you. Sally has been working part-time the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago." But before I could hang up she said, "Wait a minute. Did you say your name was Paul?"

"Yes."

"Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down, Here it is I'll read it 'Tell him I still say there are other worlds to sing in. He'll know what I mean'."

I thanked her and hung up. I did know what Sally meant.

source: www.inspirationalstories.com

Friend and Acquaintance

2009-06-03T12:50:00.000+05:30

There is a difference between being an acquaintance and being a friend. An acquaintance is someone whose name you know, who you see every now and then, who you probably have something in common with and who you feel comfortable around.

It's a person that you can invite to your home and share things with. But they are people who you don't share your life with, whose actions sometimes you don't understand because you don't know enough about them.

On the other hand, a friend is someone you love. Not that you are "in love" with them, but you care about them and you think about them when they are not there. The people you are reminded of when you see something they might like, and you know this because you know them so well. They are the people whose pictures you have and whose faces are in your head regardless.

Friends are the people you feel safe around because you know they care about you. They call just to see how you are doing, because a friend doesn't need an excuse. They tell you the truth, the first time, and you do the same. You know that if you have a problem, they are there to listen.

Friends are the people who won't laugh at you or hurt you, and if they do hurt you they try hard to make it up to you. They are the people you love, regardless of whether you realize it.

Friends are the people you cried with when you got rejected from colleges and during the last song at the prom and at graduation. They are the people that when you hug them, you don't think about how long to hug and who's going to be the first one to let go.

Maybe they are the people that hold the rings at your wedding, or maybe they are the people who give you away at your wedding, or maybe they are the people you marry. Maybe they are the people who cry at your wedding because they are happy or because they are proud.

They are the people who stop you from making mistakes and help you when you do. They are are the people whose hand you can hold, or you can hug or give them a kiss and not have it be awkward because they understand the things you do and they love you for them.

They stick with you and stand by you. They hold your hand. They watch you live and you watch them live and you learn from them. Your life is not the same without them.

Giving Calhoun the Ball

2009-06-03T12:47:00.001+05:30

There once was this important football game between two teams. One teams was much larger than the other. The larger team was dominating the game and beating the smaller team. The coach for the smaller team saw that his team was not able to contain or block the larger team. So his only hope was to call the plays that went to Calhoun, the fastest back in the aream who could easily outrun the larger players once he broke free.

The coach talked with his quarterback about giving the ball to Calhoun and letting him run with it. The first play the coach was excited, but Calhoun did not get the ball. The second play was again signaled for Calhoun, but once again Colhoun did not get the ball. Now the game was in the final seconds with the smaller team's only hope being for Calhoun to break free and score the winning touchdown. The third play and again Calhoun did not get the ball. The coach was very upset so he sent in the play again for the fourth and final play. The ball was snapped and the quarterbak was sacked, ending the game. The coach was furious as he confronted the quarterback: "I told you four times to give the ball to Calhoun and now we've lost the game."

The quarterback stood tall and told the coach, "Four times I called the play to give the ball to Calhoun. The problem was that Calhoun did not want the ball."

Source: www.inspirationalstories.com

Acorn Planter

2009-06-03T12:45:00.000+05:30

In the 1930s a young traveler was exploring the French Alps. He came upon a vast strech of barren land. It was desolate. It was forbidding. It was ugly. It was the kind of place you hurry away from.

Then, suddenly, the young traveler stopped dead in his tracks. In the middle of this vast wasteland was a bent-over old man. On his back was a sack of acorns. In his hand was a four-foot length of iron pipe.

The man was using the iron pope to punch holes in the ground. Then from the sack he would take an acorn and put it in the hole. Later the old man the traveler, "I've planted over 100,000 acorns. Perhaps only a tenth of them will grow." The old man's wive and son had died, and this was how he chose to spend his final years. "I want to do something useful," he said.

Twenty-five years later the now-not-as-young traveler returned to the same desolate area. What he saw amazed him. He could not believe his own eyes. The land was covered with a beautiful forest two miles wide and five miles long. Birds were singing, animals were playing, and wild flowers perfumed the air.

The traveler stood there recalling the desolation that once was; a beautiful oak forest stood there now - all because someone cared.

Stay Young

2009-06-02T15:17:00.001+05:30

My message to the young is to always remain young. Never become old. Your body will become old, but your mind has no necessity to become old. If your mind remains young and fresh, ready to learn, ready to explore new dimensions of life, you are alive. The moment your mind stops exploring, expanding, you are no more alive. You may vegetate, you may drag you body around for twenty, thirty more years.

DON’T ACCEPT OTHERS’ PRESCRIPTION FOR YOU

Others want to prescribe everything in your life. You can remain young only if you never accept any conditioning from anybody else. Youngness is something like sharpening your sword; you should inquire everything on your own. Don’t believe in the Holy Scriptures, because there is nothing holy in them, they are not even first-rate literature.

HAVE A HEALTHY DOUBT

Your starting point should not be belief, but a healthy doubt. And remember, doubt does not mean disbelief, doubt simply means, “I don’t know and I want to inquire. I have not come to a conclusion to say yes or no.” Doubt is youth, belief is old age. The person is tired of inquiry; he has started believing in somebody else. It is better to die as a seeker; at least you have the contentment that you did everything that was possible, and you will have originality.

WEAR YOUR ORIGINAL FACE

And this is my experience: to wear your original face is the greatest face is the greatest joy in the world, but everybody is wearing a mask. Somebody is Hindu, that is mask; somebody is a Mohammedan, that is a mask. A young man has to fight against all masks; he has to declare all the universe, “I am going to remain individual, I am going to remain just myself, I am not going to imitate anybody.”

WEALTH SHOULD BE RESPECTED

Young people should strive for health because centuries, unnecessarily, wealth has been condemned. Wealth should be respected in the same way as we respect any other creativity. Somebody paints, we respect. Somebody make a statue, we respect. Somebody makes music, we respect. Somebody creates wealth, and we condemn.

Richness should be respected if you want to destroy poverty.

CREATING WEALTH IS A GREAT CREATIVITY

The young people should change the whole movement. Richness should be respected and should be created – it can be created. Just as there are Picassos, there are Fords who can create wealth. With technology available, to create wealth is the simplest thing. You just have to inspire young people to create. Rather than wasting their energy in frustration and protests and fighting and throwing stones and destroying buses, the same energy can make the country a paradise.

Courtesy Osho

International Foundation

www.osho.com

Stop the Urge to Control

2009-06-02T15:12:00.003+05:30

Caring for someone is one thing, but taking control of their lives is a total no-no. The urge to dictate terms, give unsolicited advise will suffocate the other person and ruin perfect relationships. Give space, move back when needed and respect everyone's opinion.

Love and Time

2009-06-02T15:10:00.000+05:30

Once upon a time, there was an island where all the feelings lived: Happiness, Sadness, Knowledge, and all of the others, including Love. One day it was announced to the feelings that the island would sink, so all constructed boats and left. Except for Love.

Love was the only one who stayed. Love wanted to hold out until the last possible moment.

When the island had almost sunk, Love decided to ask for help.

Richness was passing by Love in a grand boat. Love said,
"Richness, can you take me with you?"
Richness answered, "No, I can't. There is a lot of gold and silver in my boat. There is no place here for you."

Love decided to ask Vanity who was also passing by in a beautiful vessel. "Vanity, please help me!"
"I can't help you, Love. You are all wet and might damage my boat," Vanity answered.

Sadness was close by so Love asked, "Sadness, let me go with you."
"Oh . . . Love, I am so sad that I need to be by myself!"

Happiness passed by Love, too, but she was so happy that she did not even hear when Love called her.

Suddenly, there was a voice, "Come, Love, I will take you." It was an elder. So blessed and overjoyed, Love even forgot to ask the elder where they were going. When they arrived at dry land, the elder went her own way. Realizing how much was owed the elder,

Love asked Knowledge, another elder, "Who Helped me?"
"It was Time," Knowledge answered.
"Time?" asked Love. "But why did Time help me?"
Knowledge smiled with deep wisdom and answered, "Because only Time is capable of understanding how valuable Love is."

Are You a Bucket Filler or Dipper

2009-06-02T15:07:00.000+05:30

You have heard of the cup that overflowed. This is a story of a bucket that is like the cup, only larger, it is an invisible bucket. Everyone has one. It determines how we feel about ourselves, about others, and how we get along with people. Have you ever experienced a series of very favorable things which made you want to be good to people for a week? At that time, your bucket was full.

A bucket can be filled by a lot of things that happen. When a person speaks to you, recognizing you as a human being, your bucket is filled a little. Even more if he calls you by name, especially if it is the name you like to be called. If he compliments you on your dress or on a job well done, the level in your bucket goes up still higher. There must be a million ways to raise the level in another's bucket. Writing a friendly letter, remembering something that is special to him, knowing the names of his children, expressing sympathy for his loss, giving him a hand when his work is heavy, taking time for conversation, or, perhaps more important, listing to him.

When one's bucket is full of this emotional support, one can express warmth and friendliness to people. But, remember, this is a theory about a bucket and a dipper. Other people have dippers and they can get their dippers in your bucket. This, too, can be done in a million ways.

Lets say I am at a dinner and inadvertently upset a glass of thick, sticky chocolate milk that spills over the table cloth, on a lady's skirt, down onto the carpet. I am embarrassed. "Bright Eyes" across the table says, "You upset that glass of chocolate milk." I made a mistake, I know I did, and then he told me about it! He got his dipper in my bucket! Think of the times a person makes a mistake, feels terrible about it, only to have someone tell him about the known mistake ("Red pencil" mentality!)

Buckets are filled and buckets are emptied ? emptied many times because people don't really think about what are doing. When a person's bucket is emptied, he is very different than when it is full. You say to a person whose bucket is empty, "That is a pretty tie you have," and he may reply in a very irritated, defensive manner.

Although there is a limit to such an analogy, there are people who seem to have holes in their buckets. When a person has a hole in his bucket, he irritates lots of people by trying to get his dipper in their buckets. This is when he really needs somebody to pour it in his bucket because he keeps losing.

The story of our lives is the interplay of the bucket and the dipper. Everyone has both. The unyielding secret of the bucket and the dipper is that when you fill another's bucket it does not take anything out of your own bucket. The level in our own bucket gets higher when we fill another's, and, on the other hand, when we dip into another's bucket we do not fill our own ... we lose a little.

For a variety of reasons, people hesitate filling the bucket of another and consequently do not experience the fun, joy, happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction connected with making another person happy. Some reasons for this hesitancy are that people think it sounds "fakey," or the other person will be suspicious of the motive, or it is "brown-nosing."

Therefore, let us put aside our dipper and resolve to touch someone's life in order to fill their bucket.

source: www.inspirationalstories.com

Higher Power

2009-06-02T15:03:00.002+05:30

When I found out that I was pregnant, nothing could have made me happier. My husband and I had many joys, among them feeling the baby kick and prod. Lamaze was also fun, but in a nontraditional kind of way. However, I thought that I could totally breeze through this "birthing" stuff. Yeah, right.

At 35 weeks, I broke out in the most horrible rash. It was unbearable, and I didn't sleep for 15 nights, for more than an hour. The doctors tried everything to relieve it, but induction was inevitable. So, at 37 weeks, I was going to "breeze" through the induction. Yeah, right.

After almost 3 days of labor, and nothing more than crackers and Sprite, the doctor decided that if my water didn't break, or the contractions still were unstable by 8 pm that night, they would take me off the Pitocin, and do a C-Section the next morning. Well, at 7:59 that night, the contractions were getting stronger, and I was sure that I was going to die. I also had a whole room full of well-wishers, but not for long. I asked my husband to help me, I needed to go to the bathroom, so off I went IV's and all.

About that time, I hear this enormous pop and my water broke soon after that. "Here we go," I thought. "I guess that means I don't get my supper, huh?" Well the longing for food was soon replaced by the longing for drugs. After 6 hours of pushing, and still no baby, they decided to take her out via episiotomy and vacuum. She finally made her way into the world.

I named her Ashley. Ashley was the cutest, loudest little thing that I had ever seen or heard, and she was mine.

Little did I know that tragedy awaited and I would feel a pain worse than I thought was possible. While I was helplessly watching, Ashley was about to fight the battle of her life. On the second day of life, my baby quit trying to breast feed. She also lay dormant, not moving. Even the act of changing her diaper didn't upset her and she couldn't maintain her body temperature. My gut was about to explode. Something was wrong, something bad.

I immediately called in the nurses, who called in the neonatologist. They assured me that we had just miscalculated Ashley's due date, and she was a little preemie. I knew better. I felt it. Something was much worse than that.

Unfortunately, I was right. The next day, I was released from the hospital, but Ashley stayed due to a sudden onset of jaundice. My husband and I left just long enough to check on the house and get a stuffed animal for Ashley. When we arrived back to the hospital, we passed a baby being rushed to NICU. This baby was hooked up to so many tubes, you could hardly see it. I found out five minutes later that it was not just a baby -- it was my baby.

My heart sank, I cried uncontrollably. After an hour or so, they let me see her. They told me that every test they had ran was normal, but that she had several severe seizures and was in a coma. They told us that their was nothing more that we could do, to go home and get some rest. They would call if anything came up.

We had been home for almost 4 hours when they called. "Mrs. Cody, get over here, now. We ran her blood-ammonia, it should be no more than 34, it's 1800! We are transporting her immediately to a specialist in Nashville. She is clinically dead, but we're going to send her on. You might want to hold her for the last time.

While I frantically got my husband, I got so mad at God. All I could scream is, "WHY? IT'S NOT FAIR! HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?"

We arrived at the Nashville hospital about an hour after Ashley. She was sick, and fought hard for three days, but she would live. She was diagnosed with a Urea Cycle Disorder. A rare metabolic disorder that takes place in the liver. She was in the hospital for weeks, but is now a healthy and happy 10 month old child. She will always have this disorder, but with the right doctors, diet and medications, and frequent hospital stays, she will be okay.

For a woman that always had to plan, this was not easy for me. I am not the kind to put things in the hands of a higher power. But now I do. I do everyday. You have got to learn to trust in someone other than yourself, and when I feel down, or have a bad day, I think of the struggle and the grueling tests and treatments my daughter has gone through, and goes through on a regular basis.

We don't have as much control in life as we would like to think. Always give credit to "someone other than yourself." Never take your health or people you love for granted. They may not always be here. We don't always know why bad things happen to good people, but they do. We all have a lesson to learn, we just have to slow down and be willing to be taught. We have a purpose. Each one of us, even if we don't know it yet. There is one thing that I know. Miracles do happen, and they happen everyday, and I am a better person for having experienced it. Through the headache and tears, we have been blessed.

Source: www.inspirationalstories.com

Monk's Vision

2009-06-02T15:03:00.001+05:30

An old monk prayed many years for a vision from God to strengthen his faith, but it never came. He had almost given up hope when, one day, a vision appeared. The old monk was overjoyed. But then, right in the middle of the vision, the monastery bell rang. The ringing of the bell meant it was time to feed the poor who gathered daily at the monastery gate. And it was the old monk's turn to feed them. If he failed to show up with food, the poor people would leave quietly, thinking the monastery had nothing to give them that day.

The old monk was torn between his earthly duty and his heavenly vision. However, before the bell stopped tolling, the monk had made his decision. With a heavy heart, he turned his back on the vision and went off to feed the poo. Nearly an hour later, the old monk returned to his room. When he opened the door, he could hardly believe his eyes. There in the room was the vision, waiting for him. As the monk dropped to is kness in thanksgiving, the vision said to him, "My son, had you not gone off to feed the poor, I would not have stayed."

The best way to serve God is to reach out in service to our brothers and sisters, especially those less gifted than ourselves.