48 replies to this topic

[sobank]

Ok. so we have important documentary thread. But there is vast knowledge released in print or web published. We should gather that too. So here is a thread where you can combine all those very interesting materials.

I am allowing you guys to put here anything but please try to stay away from that conspiracy theories as much as possible.


So here are the major guide for posting an article.

1- state the topic
2- a small description  if its not clear from topic
3- SOURCE.................. Please , please, please state the source.

[sobank]

Rare Photographs of Now Extinct Beasts

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featu...ct-beasts/14727

[sobank]

Picture of Molecule (see the source for actual image)

"IBM Takes First 3D Image of Atomic Bonds"

http://gizmodo.com/5346964/crazy+powerful-...ar-atomic-bonds


From what I remember of chemistry, molecules were presented on computer screens, or at the very least with dowels and balls. Thanks to this incredible discovery, however, I'm jealous of how tomorrow's engineers will view—and control—nature's building blocks.

Now, the picture above is pretty unremarkable, right? Black and white (trivia: molecules have no color), grainy, shot in the kind of out-of-focus manner you expect from a guy like me, who can't seem to venture out beyond the Auto setting on his entry-level Nikon D40 DSLR. But wait a second. Doesn't the image kind of seem, well, familiar? Like high school chem class familiar? Balls and sticks familiar?

Here's another image; a computer generated image that's much more at home for anyone who studied atoms and molecules in the dead and gone days of 1997:

Make sense now? That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the "specimen"—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.

You can actually make out each of those atoms and their bonds, and it's thanks to this: An atomic force microscope.

Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon microscale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an "ultrahigh vacuum" and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometers. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometers above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.

And that's the real beauty of this image. For the first time ever we can see where each of those carbon and hydrogen atoms line up, and the overall symmetrical shape they create. In 3D.
Quirky, Quarky, Quantum Computing

That IBM, a hardware company, was the entity to accomplish this feat should be fairly obvious, given what we know (and don't yet know) about quantum computing. Said an IBM representative in an email to me this morning, "This pioneering achievement and the new insights gained from the experiments extend the ability of scientists to study matter with atomic resolution and open up exciting new possibilities for exploring electronic building blocks and devices at the ultimate atomic and molecular scale-devices that might be vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today's processors and memory devices."

In a quarkshell, that means this discovery might help future engineers manipulate atoms and their bonds, as well as create powerful, energy-sipping quantum computers for their cryptography needs, space travel or maybe even large black and yellow rooms that make our fantasies come true (or at the very least allow androids to play Sherlock Holmes).

But not so fast, Einstein. I see that tabletop subspace communicator you've imagined on your desktop. It's a great idea, and while I understand your enthusiasm for such things, as Matt explained earlier this month quantum computing, entangled desktops and Star Trek holodecks are all decades away, if not more.

What this discovery does do however is advance our primitive understanding of the Way Things Are. It's a small, nanometer-sized piece in a puzzle that doesn't even have all the pieces on the table yet. Hell, we don't even know where all the pieces are yet. From the looks of these images though, we will someday soon. [Images: IBM]

[sobank]

Timeline of important events in history of universe and earth
http://www.sciencenews.org/pictures/darwin...ine/darwin.html

[sobank]

Early sound recording/ white house presidential race 1908
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id...rst_sound_bites

[sobank]

2008: Science news of the year

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id...ews_of_the_year

[sobank]

world war 2 propoganda

http://www.life.com/image/84295579/in-gall...paganda-posters

[sobank]

pictures from D day world war 2
http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery...ration-overlord

[sobank]

Treasures of the Ancient World Carved Into Rock

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featu...orld-rock/14930

[sobank]

Things that dont make sense

http://www.newscientist.com/special/13-mor...ref=online-news

[sobank]

One Way Ticket to Mars-- Dont Bring Astronauts Back
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/opinion/01krauss.html?_r=2

NOW that the hype surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings has come and gone, we are faced with the grim reality that if we want to send humans back to the Moon the investment is likely to run in excess of $150 billion. The cost to get to Mars could easily be two to four times that, if it is possible at all.

This is the issue being wrestled with by a NASA panel, convened this year and led by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, that will in the coming weeks present President Obama with options for the near-term future of human spaceflight. It is quickly becoming clear that going to the Moon or Mars in the next decade or two will be impossible without a much bigger budget than has so far been allocated. Is it worth it?

The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.

There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?

While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.

Moreover, one of the reasons that is sometimes given for sending humans into space is that we need to move beyond Earth if we are to improve our species’ chances of survival should something terrible happen back home. This requires people to leave, and stay away.

There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions.

First, money. Much of the cost of a voyage to Mars will be spent on coming home again. If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel.

The president of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin, has offered one possible solution: two ships, sent separately. The first would be sent unmanned and, once there, combine onboard hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to generate the fuel for the return trip; the second would take the astronauts there, and then be left behind. But once arrival is decoupled from return, one should ask whether the return trip is really necessary.

Surely if the point of sending astronauts is to be able to carry out scientific experiments that robots cannot do (something I am highly skeptical of and one of the reasons I don’t believe we should use science to attempt to justify human space exploration), then the longer they spend on the planet the more experiments they can do.

Moreover, if the radiation problems cannot be adequately resolved then the longevity of astronauts signing up for a Mars round trip would be severely compromised in any case. As cruel as it may sound, the astronauts would probably best use their remaining time living and working on Mars rather than dying at home.

If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

We might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. Here again, I have found a significant fraction of scientists older than 65 who would be willing to live out their remaining years on the red planet or elsewhere. With older scientists, there would be additional health complications, to be sure, but the necessary medical personnel and equipment would still probably be cheaper than designing a return mission.

Delivering food and supplies to these new pioneers — along with the tools to grow and build whatever they need, for however long they live on the red planet — is likewise more reasonable and may be less expensive than designing a ticket home. Certainly, as in the Zubrin proposal, unmanned spacecraft could provide the crucial supply lines.

The largest stumbling block to a consideration of one-way missions is probably political. NASA and Congress are unlikely to do something that could be perceived as signing the death warrants of astronauts.

Nevertheless, human space travel is so expensive and so dangerous that we are going to need novel, even extreme solutions if we really want to expand the range of human civilization beyond our own planet. To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again.

Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Physics of ‘Star Trek.’”

[sobank]

Ok i am tempted to not include this news into this thread. But since the solid evidence is there without any trace of usual tabloids, this needs a look.

UFO puzzle: Alien baby or elaborate hoax?

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/ufo-...9-1225768750492

[sobank]

Galaxy's 'cannibalism' revealed

The vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by digesting stars from other galaxies, research has shown.

When an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were "remnants of dwarf galaxies".

The astronomers report their findings in the journal Nature.

This consumption of stars has been suggested previously, but the team's ultra-deep survey has provided detailed images to show that it took place.

This shows the "hierarchical model" of galaxy formation in action.

The model predicts that large galaxies should be surrounded by relics of smaller galaxies they have consumed.

FROM BBC WORLD SERVICE

More from BBC World Service

The scientists charted the outskirts of Andromeda in detail for the first time.

They discovered stars that could not have formed within the galaxy itself.

Pauline Barmby, an astronomer from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who was involved in the study, told BBC News the pattern of the stars' orbits revealed their origin.

"Andromeda is so close that we can map out all the stars," she said.

"And when you see a sort of lump of stars that far out, and with the same orbit, you know they can't have been there forever."

Andromeda, which is approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth, is still expanding, say the scientists.

The researchers also saw a "stream of stars" of a nearby galaxy called Triangulum "stretching" towards Andromeda.

Dr Scott Chapman, reader in astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK, was also involved in the research.

He said: "Ultimately, these two galaxies may end up merging completely.

"Ironically, galaxy formation and galaxy destruction seem to go hand in hand."

Nickolay Gnedin, an astrophysicist from the University of Chicago, US, who was not involved in this study, described the work as showing "galactic archaeology in action".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8234898.stm?

[sobank]

The 5 Smallest Countries in the World

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/01/04/the-5-...s-in-the-world/

[sobank]

Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of all time
Published on 4/25/2006

A hoax is an attempt to trick an audience into believing that something false is real. We came up with a selection of the Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of all time:

The Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster

Ancient Scottish legends spoke of a giant sea monster that lived in the waters of Loch Ness. In 1934, Colonel Robert Wilson, a highly respectable British surgeon, said that he noticed something moving in the water and took a picture of it. The resulting image showed the slender neck of a serpent rising out of the Loch. The photo came to be known simply as "The Surgeon's Photo" and for decades it was considered to be the best evidence of the monster.

It wasn't until 1994, when Christian Spurling, before his death at the age of 90, confessed his involvement in a plot, that included Wetherell and Colonel Wilson, to create the famous photo. Apparently Wetherell's motive was revenge, since he was humiliated years earlier when the supposed monster's footprints he found were nothing but dried hippo's footsteps.


Hitler's $6 million-dollar diary

On April 22, 1983 the German magazine Der Stern announced that it had made the greatest Nazi memorabilia find of all time: a diary kept by Adolf Hitler himself. And this was not just one thin journal.

The magazine had paid 10 million German marks ($6 million at that time) for the sixty small books as well as two "special issues" about Rudolf Hess' flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945.

However, within two weeks, the Hitler Diaries were revealed as being "grotesquely plump fakes" made on modern paper using modern ink and full of historical inaccuracies, the most obvious of which might have been the fact that the monogram on the title page read 'FH' instead of 'AH' (for Adolf Hitler). The diaries were actually written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger of Hitler's works, who was sentenced to 42 months in prison.


The Jewish master plan to dominate the World

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by Jews. Following its first publication in 1903 in the Russian Empire, numerous independent investigations have demonstrated that the document is a hoax; notably, a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921 revealed that much of the material was directly plagiarized from earlier works of political satire unrelated to Jews.

In Russia, it helped to the idea that the Bolshevik movement was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. On WWII, The Protocols became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. It was made required reading for German students.

Today, many Arab governments funded new printings of the Protocols, and taught them in their schools as historical fact. In Syria, The Protocols is currently a best-seller, and government-controlled television channels occasionally broadcast mini-series concerning the Protocols.


Idaho, the US state with a made-up name

Idaho it's perhaps the only state to be named as the result of a hoax. When a name was being selected for new territory, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested "Idaho," which he claimed was a Native American term meaning "gem of the mountains".

It was later revealed Willing had made up the name himself, and the original Idaho territory was re-named Colorado because of it. Eventually the controversy was forgotten, and modern-day Idaho was given the made-up name when the Idaho Territory was formally created in 1863.


The Alien Autopsy footage from Roswell UFO crash

On 5 May 1995, Ray Santilli, a London-based film producer, presented for the first time his alleged "Alien Autopsy" footage to media representatives and UFO researchers. The body was suggested to belong to one of the aliens picked from the supposed Roswell UFO crash site in 1947. The footage became world-known inmediatly.

he debate on whether the autopsied body is a very realistic mannequin, a girl with a genetic disorder (such as progeria or Turner's syndrome), or a real alien is still going on. Pathologists have also questioned the techniques being used in the supposed autopsy. Ironically, the best evidence against the film comes from one of the background details. On one wall of the autopsy room, there is a type of warning sign that was not produced until 1967, two decades after the alleged event.

Fox TV produced a programme debunking the video as a hoax a couple of years later and, in 2006, a British comedy movie called "Alien Autopsy" was released, on the subject of Santilli faking the autopsy footage, who was apparently involved in the movie's production, which if so would suggest that the autopsy footage was indeed faked.




The fossil that embarrassed British Paleontology

The so-called Piltdown Man was fragments of a skull and jaw bone found in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown in the English county of Sussex. The fragments were claimed by experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early man.

From the British Museum's reconstruction of the skull, it was proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between ape and man, since the combination of a human-like cranium with an ape-like jaw tended to support the notion then prevailing in England that human evolution was brain-led.

In 1953, 41 years later, the Piltdown man was finally exposed as a composite forgery: it consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of a Sarawak orangutan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown.


The Catholic Pope that turned out to be a woman

John Anglicus, a ninth century Englishman, travelled to Rome, became a Cardinal, and when Pope Leo IV died in 853 A.D., he was unanimously elected pope. As Pope John VIII, he ruled for two years, until 855 A.D. However, while riding one day from St. Peter's to the Lateran, he had to stop by the side of the road and, to the astonishment of everyone, gave birth to a child. It turned out that Pope John VIII was really a woman. In other words, Pope John was really Pope Joan.

According to legend, upon discovering the Pope's true gender, the people of Rome tied her feet together and dragged her behind a horse while stoning her, until she died. Another legend has it that she was sent to a faraway convent to repent her sins and that the child she bore grew up to become the Bishop of Ostia. It is not known whether the story of Pope Joan is true.


The "Chess Machine" that fooled Napoleon

The Turk was a famous hoax which purported to be a chess-playing automaton first constructed and unveiled in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. He first exhibited the Turk at the court of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa in 1770, and later took it on a tour of Europe for several years during the 1780s. The Turk defeated prominent world-figures, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

The cabinet had doors that opened to reveal internal clockwork mechanisms, and when activated the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent. However, the cabinet was a cleverly constructed illusion that allowed a chess master to hide inside and operate the mannequin. Consequently, it won most games.


The buying of the Catholic Church by Microsoft

In 1994 a press release began circulating around the internet claiming that Microsoft had bought the Catholic church. The release quoted Bill Gates saying that he considered religion to be a growth market and that, "The combined resources of Microsoft and the Catholic Church will allow us to make religion easier and more fun for a broader range of people." Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would acquire exclusive electronic rights to the Bible and would make the sacraments available online.

Microsoft had to issue a formal denial of the release on December 16, 1994. This was the first internet hoax to reach a mass audience using the internet. The authors of these hoaxes remain unknown.


The Martian invasion that frightened the World

The War of the Worlds, is a radio adaptation by Orson Welles based upon H. G. Wells' classic novel, was performed by Mercury Theatre on the Air as a Halloween special on October 30, 1938. The live broadcast reportedly frightened many listeners into believing that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. It has been called the "single greatest media hoax of all time", although it was not intended to be one.

Contemporary newspapers reported panic ensued, with people fleeing the area, and others thinking they could smell the poison gas or could see the flashes of the fighting in the distance. Several people reportedly rushed to the "scene" of the events in New Jersey to see if they could catch a glimpse of the unfolding events, including a few astronomers from Princeton University who went looking for the "meteorite" that had supposedly fallen near their school.

It is sometimes said that the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was first received in skepticism as a consequence of the radio performance. Amazingly enough, the drama has been rewritten to apply to other locations and rebroadcast, with similar results:
- A 1944 broadcast in Santiago, Chile caused panic, including mobilization of troops by the governor.
- A February 12, 1949 broadcast in Quito, Ecuador panicked tens of thousands. Some listeners, enraged at the deception, set fire to the radio station and the offices of El Comercio, the capital's leading newspaper, killing twenty people.

http://www.2spare.com/item_52492.aspx

[sobank]

How a person dies in outer space.

http://www.damninteresting.com/outer-space-exposure

Outer Space Exposure
Written by Alan Bellows on 17 July 2008

This classic Damn Interesting article was originally published on 27 November 2006.

Armstrong on the moonIn scores of science fiction stories, hapless adventurers find themselves unwittingly introduced to the vacuum of space without proper protection. There is often an alarming cacophony of screams and gasps as the increasingly bloated humans writhe and spasm. Their exposed veins and eyeballs soon bulge in what is clearly a disagreeable manner. The ill-fated adventurers rapidly swell like over-inflated balloons, ultimately bursting in a gruesome spray of blood.

As is true with many subjects, this representation in popular culture does not reflect the reality of exposure to outer space. Ever since humanity first began to probe outside of our protective atmosphere, a number of live organisms have been exposed to vacuum, both deliberately and otherwise. By combining these experiences with our knowledge of outer space, scientists have a pretty clear idea of what would happen if an unprotected human slipped into the cold, airless void.

In the 1960s, as technology was bringing the prospect of manned spaceflight into reality, engineers recognized the importance of determining the amount of time astronauts would have to react to integrity breaches such as a damaged spacecraft or punctured space-suits. To that end, NASA constructed an assortment of large altitude chambers to mimic the hostile environments found at varying distances above the Earth, accounting for factors such as air pressure, temperature, and radiation. Adventurous volunteers were subjected to simulations of the conditions found several miles up, and a handful of animal tests were conducted with even lower pressures.

Using the data from these experiments and their knowledge of outer space, scientists were able to make some reasonable conclusions about how the human body would respond to sudden depressurization. A series of accidents over the years proved most of their extrapolations to be accurate. In 1965, in a space-suit test gone awry, a technician in an altitude chamber was exposed to a hard vacuum. The defective suit was unable to hold pressure, and the man collapsed after fourteen seconds. He regained consciousness shortly after the chamber was repressurized, and he was uninjured. In a later incident, another technician spent four minutes trapped at low pressure by a malfunctioning altitude chamber. He lost consciousness and began to turn blue, but escaped death when one of the managers kicked in one of the machine’s glass gauges, allowing air to seep into the chamber.

A Soviet Soyuz spacecraftArtist’s rendering of a Soviet Soyuz spacecraftIn 1971, three Russian cosmonauts aboard an early Soyuz spacecraft tragically experienced the vacuum of space first-hand, as described in the Almanac of Soviet Manned Space Flight:
“…the orbital module was normally separated by 12 pyrotechnic devices which were supposed to fire sequentially, but they incorrectly fired simultaneously, and this caused a ball joint in the capsule’s pressure equalization valve to unseat, allowing air to escape. The valve normally opens at low altitude to equalize cabin air pressure to the outside air pressure. This caused the cabin to lose all its atmosphere in about 30 seconds while still at a height of 168 km. In seconds, Patsayev realized the problem and unstrapped from his seat to try and cover the valve inlet and shut off the valve but there was little time left. It would take 60 seconds to shut off the valve manually and Patsayev managed to half close it before passing out. Dobrovolsky and Volkov were virtually powerless to help since they were strapped in their seats, with little room to move in the small capsule and no real way to assist Patsayev. The men died shortly after passing out. [...] The rest of the descent was normal and the capsule landed at 2:17 AM. The recovery forces located the capsule and opened the hatch only to find the cosmonauts motionless in their seats. On first glance they appeared to be asleep, but closer examination showed why there was no normal communication from the capsule during descent.”

When the human body is suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space, a number of injuries begin to occur immediately. Though they are relatively minor at first, they accumulate rapidly into a life-threatening combination. The first effect is the expansion of gases within the lungs and digestive tract due to the reduction of external pressure. A victim of explosive decompression greatly increases their chances of survival simply by exhaling within the first few seconds, otherwise death is likely to occur once the lungs rupture and spill bubbles of air into the circulatory system. Such a life-saving exhalation might be due to a shout of surprise, though it would naturally go unheard where there is no air to carry it.

In the absence of atmospheric pressure water will spontaneously convert into vapor, which would cause the moisture in a victim’s mouth and eyes to quickly boil away. The same effect would cause water in the muscles and soft tissues of the body to evaporate, prompting some parts of the body to swell to twice their usual size after a few moments. This bloating may result in some superficial bruising due to broken capillaries, but it would not be sufficient to break the skin.

A NASA vacuum chamberA NASA altitude chamberWithin seconds the reduced pressure would cause the nitrogen which is dissolved in the blood to form gaseous bubbles, a painful condition known to divers as “the bends.” Direct exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would also cause a severe sunburn to any unprotected skin. Heat does not transfer out of the body very rapidly in the absence of a medium such as air or water, so freezing to death is not an immediate risk in outer space despite the extreme cold.

For about ten full seconds– a long time to be loitering in space without protection– an average human would be rather uncomfortable, but they would still have their wits about them. Depending on the nature of the decompression, this may give a victim sufficient time to take measures to save their own life. But this period of “useful consciousness” would wane as the effects of brain asphyxiation begin to set in. In the absence of air pressure the gas exchange of the lungs works in reverse, dumping oxygen out of the blood and accelerating the oxygen-starved state known as hypoxia. After about ten seconds a victim will experience loss of vision and impaired judgement, and the cooling effect of evaporation will lower the temperature in the victim’s mouth and nose to near-freezing. Unconsciousness and convulsions would follow several seconds later, and a blue discoloration of the skin called cyanosis would become evident.

At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat. If pressurized oxygen is administered within about one and a half minutes, a person in such a state is likely make a complete recovery with only minor injuries, though the hypoxia-induced blindness may not pass for some time. Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. There are no recorded instances of successful resuscitation beyond that threshold.

Though an unprotected human would not long survive in the clutches of outer space, it is remarkable that survival times can be measured in minutes rather than seconds, and that one could endure such an inhospitable environment for almost two minutes without suffering any irreversible damage. The human body is indeed a resilient machine.

[sobank]

http://timesonline.typepad.com/schoolgate/...-in-school.html

The 10 biggest misconceptions we learn in school

Einstein

There are some myths which become firmly ensconced in people's minds, even though they are quite definitely wrong. I saw this on my blog recently, when those commenting on a post about nursery rhymes were keen to prove to others that Ring a Ring of Roses was not written about the plague.

These ten are are some of the best - though I'm not sure they can all be blamed on the school system. Thanks very much to Manolith, and a post written by a some-time teacher, Paul Jury, whose list they are. Please let me know if you can think of any more!

(Be sure to check out Paul Jury's blog too, for more humorous lists and witticisms....)

1) Einstein got bad grades in school.

Generations of children have been heartened by the thought that this Nobel Prize winner did badly at school, but they're sadly mistaken. In fact, he did very well at school, especially in science and maths (unsurprisingly). Jury explains this as being down to Americans interpreting Einstein's 4's as D's. Karl Kruszelnicki, however, explains that it was all to do with changes to the system of marking at Einstein's school (back in1896). Either way, the myth is not true, and children do need to work to succeed. Sorry!

2) Mice like cheese

Dear oh dear. While any young child could tell you this, any mice would (if they could speak rather than squeak) explain otherwise. It appears that mice enjoy food rich in sugar, as explained in the Times, as well as peanut butter and breakfast cereals (things, as Paul Jury points out, that are rich in grains and seeds, which they are used to). So a Snickers bar would go down much better than a lump of cheddar.

3) Napoleon was short.

Ah, the aggressive short man (often called, ironically, the Napoleon) complex. Short men love a hero and Napoleon appears to fit the bill. In fact, it appears that a mistranslation explains why some said he was just 5ft 2. He was actually around 5ft 7, completely average for the 18th/19th century.

4) Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.

I don't know how many times I've heard this one and wanted to point out that it's just damn wrong! Edison invented a lot of things - in fact he's one of the most famous inventors of all time - but the light bulb wasn't one of them. What he did was develop a light bulb at the same time as the British man, Joseph Swan, who came up with it originally...

5) Lemmings throw themselves over cliffs to commit suicide

Why do we have such negative opinions of lemmings? The poor old things are sometimes so desperate for food that they do, according to the BBC "jump over high ground into water", but they aren't committing group suicide. Paul Jury blames Disney for showing the lemmings doing this in an early nature film. They've been tarnished ever since.

6) Water flushes differently in different hemispheres

No it doesn't. Sorry!

7) Humans evolved from apes

Darwin didn't actually say this, but he's been misreported ever since. What he did say was that we, and apes, and chimpanzees for that matter, had a common ancestor, once, a long, long time ago.

8) Vikings had horns/helmets with horns.

This may upset an awful lot of people, but it's pure myth. According to the Jorvik Centre, it appears that Vikings may have been buried with their helmets and with drinking horns. When they were dug up by the Victorians, they assumed that the helmets had horns....(I have to say that, until now, I had believed this one!)

9) Columbus believed the earth was flat

He didn't, you know. He may not have known how big the world was, but he wasn't worrying about falling off the edge of it. Read Teaching History on this very issue.

10) Different parts of the tongue detect different tastes

You do have different taste buds on your tongue and some are more sensitive than others. But they aren't divided into perfect, easy-to-teach sections

[sobank]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/...000/8416743.stm


Australian bees 'mummify' their beetle enemy alive
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

Stingless bee (Trigona carbonaria)
The stingless bee takes a 'Pharaoh' approach

A species of bee in Australia has found a gruesome way to deal with a parasitic interloper that can damage its hives.

The stingless bee 'mummifies' any hive beetle that tries to enter its domain - wrapping the live parasite in resin, wax and mud until it can move no more.

The mummified beetles eventually starve and shrivel on the spot, researchers report in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

The strategy is so successful that it halts a beetle invasion within minutes.

Entomologist Mark Greco made the discovery while investigating the behaviour of a species of Australian stingless bee.

The beetles remain in position and eventually starve and shrivel on the spot
Entomologist Mark Greco
Swiss Bee Research Centre, Bern

Australia has around 2,000 bee species of which just 10 are stingless.

These stingless bees are important pollinators of crops in the country, and some have a lifecycle very similar to that of honeybees, with a queen and her colony producing one to two kilograms of uniquely flavoured honey each year.

Not a lot is known about the parasites or pathogens of Australian stingless bees.

However, "occasionally one finds native beetles or other insects embedded in the wax structures of the nest while splitting or managing the hives," says Dr Greco, who is studying for a PhD at the University of Western Sydney, Australia and the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Bern, Switzerland.
Mummified small hive beetle (Aethina tumida)
Once alive, now mummified

He and a team of colleagues, including honeybee expert Dr Peter Nuemann, investigated the response of the stingless bee (Trigona carbonaria) to adult small hive beetles (Aethina tumida).

Using an innovative imaging technique, which involves taking pictures of the bee colony using a CT scanner, they could observe the insects' interactions, both at the hive entrance and also within the hive.

Whenever a small hive beetle enters, it is set upon by worker bees that wrestle it and bite at its legs.

The beetles respond by adopting what the scientists call a "turtle posture", tucking in their heads and legs.

This gives the bees an opportunity to mummify their enemy, which they do by coating the invasive parasites in resin, wax and mud.

"The beetles remain in position and eventually starve and shrivel on the spot," Mr Greco told BBC Earth News.
3D image of a stingless bee hive
A 3D view inside a live hive

The small hive beetle is a newcomer to Australia, thought to have been imported into the country during the 2000 Olympics.

Originally from Africa, it can devastate healthy honey bee colonies, and decimate struggling stingless bee colonies that become stressed by excessive heat.

But it doesn't appear to be major threat to healthy stingless bee colonies, perhaps due to the bees' defensive strategy.

The mummification process is so effective that once the bees go into action "it takes only ten minutes for all beetle advancements to cease," says Mr Greco.

"It prevents the beetles from feeding and reproducing, thus saving the colony."

[sobank]

Go to original link for proper links pics and graphics.

http://knol.google.com/k/frank-w-sweet/why...peans-white-e1#

Why Are Europeans White? (E1)
--
Tells why northern Europeans are so oddly de-pigmented compared to everyone else on the globe. Session E1 of a series of topics discussed by the Second Life "The Study of Racialism" group. It is part of our molecular anthropology series. The prior session, E5 discussed the migrations that carried our species around the globe in prehistoric times. This topic looks at later regional adaptations.
Contents

    * The Puzzle: Northern Europeans are Uniquely Depigmented
    * It Has Something to do With Solar UV and Oceans
    * Skin, Hair, and Eyes: Neoteny
    * When Did it Happen?
    * It is Connected With Eating Cereal
    * The Gulf Stream is the Cause

lessmore
Permanent link to this knol:
LinkLink
Sweet, Frank W. Why Are Europeans White? (E1):-- [Internet]. Version 26. Knol. 2009 Dec 14. Available from: http://knol.google.com/k/frank-w-sweet/why...k16kl3c2f2au/14.
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The Puzzle: Northern Europeans are Uniquely Depigmented

"White," of course, is a a social designation. The question really is, "Why are northern Europeans depigmented?" Here is a map of human skin tone. The natives of northern Europe are oddly light-skinned. They are paler than anyone else on earth.

Most people know that it has something to do with sunlight, UV, latitude, and vitamin D. Here is a map of solar UV at the surface taken from satellite. It matches the skin-tone map everywhere but Europe.

The closer you are to the equator, the darker your skin. This is because humans are extraordinarily sensitive to sunlight on the skin. Humans lack fur.
It Has Something to do With Solar UV and Oceans

UV rays produce vitamin D and reduce folate when they hit naked skin. And embryos are terribly vulnerable to both substances in the mother. When it comes to sunlight and skin tone, furless humans are balanced on a knife-blade.

Too much UV penetrating the skin (too pale-skinned under intense sunlight) increases Vitamin D but reduces folate. Lack of folate causes neural tube defects in the fetus, causing such congenital abnormalities as craniorachischisis, anencephalus, and spina bifida, leading to many miscarriages.

On the other hand, too little UV penetrating the skin (too dark-skinned under dim sunlight) increases folate but reduces vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D causes skeletal neonatal abnormalities (skull, chest, and leg malformations), rickets being the best known. Again, this causes miscarriages.

And so, humans adapt very quickly to solar UV. Prehistoric groups that migrated towards the equator got darker. Prehistoric groups that migrated away from the equator got lighter.

But this explanation fails for Europe. Northern Europeans are lighter than everyone to the south (Mediterraneans), to the east (Mongols and east-Asians), to the west (Native Americans across the Atlantic), and to the North (Inuit, Sammi, Chukchi, Aleut).

Clearly, there once was a factor at work in Europe other than dim sunlight.
Here is another map of skin tone. Again, the blob surrounding the Baltic Sea is like nothing else on the planet. That this pale population surrounds the Baltic gives the first hint. It must have something to do with the oceans.

Skin, Hair, and Eyes: Neoteny

Baltic depigmentation is not just in the skin. Here is a map of hair color. The pigment "melanin" colors hair as well as skin. Adult blondes are native only to the same unique region.



Children around the world are often blonde, but their hair darkens at puberty. So it is not just northern European adult skin that lacks pigment. It is also adult European hair.

The Baltic depigmentation is not just in the skin and hair. Here is a map of eye color. Melanin colors eyes, as well as skin and hair. Adults with blue eyes are native only to the same unique region.

(Babies around the world are often born with blue eyes, but their eyes darken within a few months.)

So it is not just northern European skin and hair that lack pigment. It is also northern European eyes. Skin, hair, eyes: adult European pigmentation resembles that of children elsewhere. This gives the second hint--neoteny.
When Did it Happen?

To solve the puzzle, find out when it happened. When did the inabitants of the Baltic region lose their melanin? It must have happened after 16 KYA (16 thousand years ago). The Baltic region was covered by ice before then and nobody lived there.

In fact, it happened after 13 KYA. Cave art from that time always shows normally pigmented people. Notice that in this painting from 13 KYA, the hunters are the same color as the deer.

It must have happened before 4.6 KYA because depigmented people first began to appear in art at that time. These Egyptian statues were painted in 2613 BC. They portray Prince Rahotep and his consort Nefret, of the Old Kingdom, early Fourth Dynasty. Notice that he is brown but she is pink.

And so, the next step in solving the puzzle is to ask, "What happened in Europe between 13 KYA and 4.6 KYA?"

What happened was the invention and spread of agriculture. Before 10 KYA people everywhere lived by hunting and gathering. Then, almost simultaneously, cereal growing was invented in four spots around the globe:

Iraq (wheat, barley, rye), China (rice), Nigeria (sorghum), and Mexico (corn or maize).
It is Connected With Eating Cereal

What does skin tone have to do with eating cereal? Even in darkness, humans get vitamin D from eating meat and fish. Otherwise they could never inhabit the arctic.

This USDA chart shows the vitamin D content of various foods. All meats have some vitamin D. Fish have very high amounts. But grains have no vitamin D at all.

People who eat grains do not get vitamin D from food; they must get it from sunlight.

This usually works out fine because grains grow only where it is warm. And this means only in latitudes with bright sunlight, with one exception.

People who live in low latitudes, where they can live off grains, get plenty of sunlight. People who live in dim sunlight cannot grow grains, and so they get vitamin D from the meat and fish that they eat.
The Gulf Stream is the Cause

The exception? There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight.

It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight.

When the inhabitants of this region switched to grain about 6 KYA, they suddenly got insufficient vitamin D to survive. They had stopped eating mostly meat and fish in a place where sunlight was too dim to produce vitamin D in normally pigmented skin.

And so they adapted by retaining into adulthood the infantile trait of extreme paleness. Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally.

For the detailed text of this topic, complete with footnoted references, citations, and all the peer-reviewed material, visit The Paleo-Etiology of Human Skin Tone.

To hear the presentation of this topic as an audio file recorded in Second Life, complete with PowerPoint slides, visit Audio Lecture E1.

[sobank]

This is a must read
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1830....html?full=true

Five laws of human nature

    * 09:00 17 December 2009 by Michael Marshall
    * For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

You're so predictable.            

Offended? We're used to the idea that nature is governed by laws that spell out how things work. But the idea that human nature is governed by such laws raises hackles. Perhaps because of this, they have often been proposed with tongue in cheek – which makes it all the more disconcerting when they turn out to be backed up by evidence.

One such law is the Peter principle, which states that in any organisation "people reach the level of their own incompetence". As we report this week, physics-based simulations suggest that this is more than just a cynical snipe at our bosses' competence. And that means we might have to rethink our ideas about who to promote to what jobs.

So what other laws of human nature might we have to reluctantly accept? Here are five that may – or may not – govern our lives.
Parkinson's law

Why is there always so much work to do? Anyone searching for an explanation might find one in Parkinson's law. Civil servant, historian and theorist Cyril Northcote Parkinson suggested in a 1955 article that work expands to fill the time available for its completion – backed up with statistical evidence drawn from his historical research. More recent mathematical analyses have lent support to the idea.

Parkinson also came up with the "law of triviality", which states that the amount of time an organisation spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its importance. He argued that nobody dares to expound on important issues in case they're wrong – but everyone is happy to opine at length about the trivial.

This in turn may be a result of Sayre's law, which states that in any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.

Parkinson also proposed a coefficient of inefficiency, which attempts to define the maximum size a committee can reach before it becomes unable to make decisions. His suggestion that it lay "somewhere 19.9 and 22.4" has stood the test of time: more recent research suggests that committees cannot include many more than 20 members before becoming utterly hapless.
Student syndrome

"If it weren't for the last minute, I wouldn't get anything done." So said an anonymous wit, and none but the most ferociously well-organised can disagree.

In fact, procrastination is a major problem for some people, especially those who are easily distracted or are uncertain of their ability to complete a task.

One of the most well-known examples of vigorous procrastination is student syndrome. As anyone who has ever been (or known) a student will know, it is standard practice to apply yourself to a task only at the last possible moment before the deadline.

Student syndrome is so common that some experts in project management recommend not assigning long periods of time to particular tasks, because the people who are supposed to do them will simply wait until just before the deadline to start work, and the project will overrun anyway (International Journal of Project Management, vol 18, p 173).

Some of the blame for student syndrome may be laid at the feet of the planning fallacy: the tendency for people to underestimate how long it will take to do something.

If you often get caught out by how long things take, we recommend considering Hofstadter's law, coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law."
Pareto principle

The rich have a lot more money than you. That might sound like a statement of the obvious, but you may be surprised by just how much richer than you they are. In fact, in most countries 80 per cent of the wealth is owned by just 20 per cent of the population.

This was first spotted by the economist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 20th century, and it seems to be a universal rule in societies – although the precise nature of the distribution has been revised over the years.

But the Pareto principle is not just about money. For most systems, 80 per cent of events are triggered by just 20 per cent of the causes. For instance, 20 per cent of the users of a popular science website are responsible for 80 per cent of the page clicks.

Businesses often use the Pareto principle as a rule of thumb, for instance deciding to do the most important 20 per cent of a job in order to get 80 per cent of the reward.
Salem hypothesis

First proposed by Bruce Salem on the discussion site Usenet, the Salem hypothesis claims that "an education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to [creationist] viewpoints". This was rephrased somewhat by P. Z. Myers as "creationists with advanced degrees are often engineers".

Is there any evidence to back this up, or is it just a gratuitous slander against engineers? A 1982 article in the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science suggested that many leading creationists trained as engineers, notably Henry Morris, one of the authors of the key creationist book The Genesis Flood. But the article did not present any figures.

More recently, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog have noted a preponderance of engineers among Islamic extremist groups. They suggested that engineers may be at greater risk of being recruited by such groups than other graduates.

Obviously creationism is not the same thing as violent activism, but Gambetta and Hertog's analysis may be useful nevertheless because they discuss the engineering mindset in some detail. They show, for instance, that engineers are more likely to be religious than other graduates (PDF).

None of this is anywhere near enough to prove the Salem hypothesis, but it does provide some intriguing circumstantial evidence.
Maes-Garreau law

Everyone loves predicting the future, and some make a career out of it. These futurists often present detailed, authoritative claims about what is going to happen, though their success rate isn't always exemplary.

A common theme in futurist predictions is that revolutionary technology of one sort or another is just around the corner, and that this technology will allow people to live forever. This can mean physical immortalityMovie Camera or some more abstracted technique like downloading one's personality into a computer. The "singularity", which Ray Kurzweil says will arrive "by 2045 or thereabouts", is a prime example.

And thus we come to the Maes-Garreau law, which states that any such prediction about a favourable future technology will fall just within the expected lifespan of the person making it.

Pattie Maes, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, observed in the late 1980s that many of her male colleagues were interested in these ideas, and tabulated when they expected the miracle technology to arrive. Sure enough, she found that the dates they predicted for the singularity were always on or around their 70th birthdays.

She mentioned her findings in a talk, but did not write them up. Subsequently, the journalist Joel Garreau made similar observations in his book Radical Evolution, which looked at the implications of such "transhumanist" ideas.

The Maes-Garreau law was finally coined, and given its name, by Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Kelly informally repeated Maes's analysis, confirming her findings. He then defined the "Maes-Garreau point" as the latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

[sobank]

Watch original link for videos of

Kim Peek, Man Who Inspired 'Rain Man,' Dies

    * December 22, 2009
    * |
    * By: Chris Jordan
    * Comments (1)

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Kim Peek, the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning 1988 movie 'Rain Man,' died of a heart attack Saturday at age 58, according to the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, Utah, Peek's home. He was known as a mega-savant who had mental handicaps but also an heightened ability to memorize and recite massive amounts of information.

Peek was an expert on 15 broad categories, including math, literature, sports, classical music, history and geography. He had memorized more than 12,000 books and could compute complex mathematical equations in his head. But he was born without the connective tissue needed to bring the left and right sides of his brain together. Consequently, he was unable to filter information and often had to twist a cord or hum to himself so he could block out distractions, according to the Deseret News.

Kim and his dad first met 'Rain Man' screenwriter Barry Morrow at a convention in the '80s and two years later Morrow had written and sold the 'Rain Man' script. Dustin Hoffman spent time with Kim and with other savants while preparing for the role and Morrow later gave Kim the Academy Award he won for Best Screenplay. Kim carried it with him on his travels.

'Rain Man,' starring Hoffman as the afflicted Raymond Babbitt and Tom Cruise as his brother and directed by Barry Levinson, won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, in addition to Best Screenplay.


http://www.moviefone.ca/2009/12/22/kim-pee...spiration-dies/

[sobank]

http://eprints.hec.gov.pk/1951/1/1878.htm

Pakistan'S POLICY TOWARDS ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT (1948-1973)

Author(s)
Rashid Ahmad Khan
Institute/University/Department Details
University of the Punjab
Session
1991
Subject
Political Science
Number of Pages
1007
Keywords (Extracted from title, table of contents and abstract of thesis)
arab-israel conflict, palestine, christians, muslims, jews, balfour declaration, seato, baghdad pact, cento, suez crisis, palestinians refugees, ramadan war, jerusalem

Abstract
The Palestinian Question is a centuries old problem which at different stages of history has involved different nations and civilizations. The strategic position of the territory of Palestine, and the location of Holy Shrines belonging to three principal religions of the world, namely Islam, Christianity and Judaism, have been the main factors responsible for the contention among the Christians, Muslims and Jews over the land of Palestine.

The Palestinian Problem in the modern sense starts with the capture of the territory by the British during the First World War and issuance of Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917 pledging to establish a Jewish National Horne in Palestine. Before that Palestine was under the suzerainty of Ottoman Empire but after the defeat of Turkey, the British were entrusted the control over Palestine under the Mandate system of the League of Nations. During the Mandate period (1922-1948) the British endeavoured to convert Palestine into a National Home for Jews as promised by them under the Bal four Declaration. For this purpose, they allowed large scale immigration of Jews into Palestine. This was opposed by the Palestinian Arabs who constituted more than two third majority of the population of Palestine, with the resultant outbreaks of Arab revolts against the British rule over Palestine The British crushed the revolts in a ruthless manner with the help of the Jews.

The atrocities perpetrated on the Palestinian Arabs provoked resentment and condemnation throughout the Arab and Muslim World including the Muslims of South Asia who were strongly linked with the land of Palestine on the basis of common religion, culture and history.

In 1948 Palestine was partitioned in accordance with a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, and the state of Israel was set up. The Western Powers, particularly the United States who had vital strategic and economic interests in the Middle East played crucial role in the establishment of Jewish state of Israel. The Western Powers continued to finance, arm and provide other assistance to the Israelis, as a result of. Which they were able to defeat the Arab armies in the First Arab-Israel War of 1948.

The principles on which Pakistan's policy towards Arab Israel Conflict is based have been formulated by such factors as geographical contiguity, common religion, traditional, cultural links and considerations of economic benefit and political support in her disputes with India.

These principles have largely remained unchanged, but there have been variations due to Pakistan's security links with the Western Powers, especially the United States who have been principal supporters of Israel against the Arabs.

In mid-1950s, Pakistan allied herself with the Western Powers by joining SEATO and Baghdad Pact (later CENTO). It was the security pressure from India and Afghanistan which compelled Pakistan to join these military pacts, but the military alliance with the West led to a divergence of perception of the nature and implications of the Arab-Israel Conflict between Pakistan and the Arabs. This divergence sharpened during the 1956 Suez Crisis. As a results Pakistan lost much of the Arab good will that she had earned in the earlier years by openly supporting the Arabs against Israel and her Western patrons. Thus, an important objective of Pakistan's policy towards the Arab-Israel Conflict, namely to win Arab political and moral support in disputes with India, suffered a serious set back.

In June, 1967 the third Arab-Israel War broke out. In this war Israel captured large territories belonging to Egypt, Jordan and Syria, including Jerusalem. The occupation of Arab territories and Jerusalem gave new dimension to the Palestinian Problem. The occupation and subsequent annexation of Jerusalem by Israel created great resentment and bitterness in the Muslim world. The firing incident at the Holy Mosque al-Aqsa caused further anguish among the Muslims throughout the world. These developments led to the holding First Islamic Summit at Rabat in September, 1969 which decided to mobilize world public opinion to force Israel to relinquish her occupation of Arab territories and Jerusalem. The Summit also decided to extend full support to the Palestinian Liberation organization as the legitimate and sole representative organization of the Palestinian people.

Pakistan extended full support to the Arab states attacked by Israel in the June, 1967 War. The Government of Pakistan even offered material assistance to Egypt, Syria and Jordan. On the question of occupied Arab territories, Jerusalem and al-Aqsa, the Government of Pakistan fully endorsed the Arab stand.

The convergence of perception of the Arab-Israel Conflict between Pakistan and the Arab states that grew during and after 1967 War was due to the weakening of military pacts which, previously, put a constraint on Pakistan's foreign policy. But, a shi ft in the US foreign policy under Kennedy Administration, the development of Super-Power Detente and the attitude of the United States during the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, compelled Pakistan to distance herself away from the military pacts like SEATO and CENTO. The growth of close and friendly relations between Pakistan and China, and improvement in bilateral relationships between Pakistan, and the Arab countries were the symbols of Pakistan's independent and (practically) nonaligned foreign policy. Under this policy Pakistan was able to take more independent stand on the Palestinian Question as it is evident from. Pakistan's representative�€™s performance at the United Nations and other international forums.

In October, 1973, the fourth war between the Arabs and Israel broke out. The war had become inevitable because of Israeli refusal to vacate the occupied Arab territories and Jerusalem. In this war the combined forces of Egypt and Syria achieve some important tactical victories in the initial phases of the war. But their military gains were thwarted by huge US arms airlift to Israel after two weeks of intense fighting. Angered by the American arms supply to Israel, the Arab countries resorted to an embargo on the oil supplies to the Western nations. Shah Faisal of Saudi Arabia played a leading role in the oil Embargo which ultimately forced the Jewish State to enter into two disengagement of Forces agreements with Egypt on the Canal front.

Pakistan expressed complete sokidarity with the Arabs during 1973 October War. The Government of Pakistan provided not only material assistance to the Arabs, the Prime Minister of Pakistan Z. A. Bhutto toured a number of Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries to mobilize political and diplomatic support to the Arabs on a broadly based united front of the entire Muslim world.

Pakistan's policy during the 1973 October War was greatly appreciated by the Arab countries. This was evident from the speeches and statements of the Arab leaders, including the chairman of P.L.O, Mr. Yasser Arafat, who participated in the Second (Lahore) Summit of Islamic countries held at Lahore in February, 1974.

Pakistan not only supported the Arab's war against Israel, she also endorsed the use of oil weapon by the Arabs against the Western countries. The pursuit of such an independent policy by Pakistan was due to further weakening of country's links with the western countries through military pacts, especially after the separation of East Pakistan which led to Pakistan�€™s dissociation from SEATO.

Download the full thesis at above link. The thesis is written in Urdu.

[sobank]

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,...1952458,00.html

How Fish (Yes, Fish) Punish One Another

Scientists often warn against anthropomorphism — the attribution of human characteristics to animals or even nonliving things. But it's hard to resist the charm of Labroides dimidiatus, a species of fish otherwise known as the bluestreak cleaner wrasse. These colorful little critters make their living in coral reefs by setting up cleaning stations where larger fish — often predators that might otherwise gobble them up — can stop by to have their skin cleaned. The wrasses busy themselves like car-wash attendants fussing around a sports car, nibbling off parasites, dead tissue and other blemishes and nourishing themselves in the process. (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.)

Since the discovery of the fish's behavior in the 1950s, cleaner wrasses have provided biologists with a delightful example of cooperation in nature. But now an international team of scientists has observed another unusual trait in the fish, one that may shed light on higher social animals, including humans. The wrasses, it appears, know how to punish one another.

It turns out that — surprise! — cleaner wrasses don't actually like to munch on dead flesh and parasites. They much prefer the slimy mucus that coats healthy fish skin, which is rich in carbohydrates. So in nature, the wrasses occasionally cheat and take a nip of their client's body. When they work alone, the wrasses strike a balance between cleaning and cheating so as not to lose their client's business. But wrasses also work in pairs. In these situations, explains Redouan Bshary of the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland — one of the authors of a new study in the journal Science, the fish face a dilemma: "Theoretically, the best idea would be to bite your client right away before your partner does, because if the client swims away, you get the benefits of the tasty bite, but the costs are shared." But the fish tend to behave themselves.

It's punishment — or just the threat of punishment — that's the key. Bshary and others already knew that in the wild, male wrasses, which are larger than females, become hopping mad when their partners steal a bite of their clients, and they often chase the female around in a threatening manner. To prove that this was indeed the physical scolding it appeared to be, Bshary and colleagues ran a tank experiment in which they introduced a plate of normal fish flakes (which wrasses like) and prawns (which wrasses love) to two fish. If either fish ate a tasty prawn, the researchers removed all the food from the tank. Sure enough, when the female nibbled the prawns, the male wrasse went berserk. As the experiment progressed, the females became less likely to eat prawns (but the males still ate the prawns with impunity). (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)

The researchers believe the results are relevant to humans because they may offer clues to how humans evolved their own uniquely complex system of punishment. Despite the centrality of the concept of punishment to human society, evolutionary biologists are stumped as to what selective pressure would have led us to punish people who have cheated or harmed not the person who does the punishing but a third party — even if that party is not a genetic relation. Some biologists suggest that punishers benefit from a boost in social status and are thus more attractive as mates.

The cleaner fish may have another rationale — one that they also might share with us. The male cleaners probably punish females for biting the client because the male is a secondary victim — the client fish often swims away after being nibbled by the female, and the male wrasse loses his chance for lunch. This rationale, over the course of evolutionary eras, could have led to human society's more diffuse arrangements for punishment. "What we might be seeing is the origin of third-party punishment in human evolutionary history," Bshary says. The line connecting the male wrasse to our criminal courts may be a long and meandering one, but that doesn't mean it's not real.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,...l#ixzz0cCwEG4jy

[sobank]

Jan 5, 1948
Life magzine issue
Cover: jinnah of Pakistan
Includes: article about status of a new Pakistani state. Some important pictures and views about this new nation.
Article name: Pakistan struggles for survival
page 16-26
<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:0px" src="http://books.google....1&output=embed" width=500 height=500></iframe>
http://books.google.com/books?id=4E0EAAAAM...;q=&f=false

Edited by sobank, 26 January 2010 - 06:48 PM.

[sobank]

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkings

dont need an intro there.

http://books.google.com/books?id=E7mEnx3zE...;q=&f=false

[sobank]

All issues of popular science online

http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:...=gbs_navlinks_s

[Saeed Khan]

Thanks a lot for so many interesting links and posts.

So the standing undisturbed water let to go down a drain doesn't start rotating anti-clockwise in Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere? I was quite sure it did until now!

[sobank]

thanks. appreciate the appreciation. :)

Just read the whole thing. it is really interesting.

-----------------------------------------------

Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong

What if Darwin's theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar...ion-genes-wrong

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There's a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . "about a full day!" Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the "myth" of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he'd recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!

Inevitably, those of us who aren't professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn't waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin's theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or "intelligent design", and it's true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts. But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, "This is big, big stuff – perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene."

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn't, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country's northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man's grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren's lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody's eye.

It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it's generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called "modern synthesis" of Darwin's theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism's abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we've come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn't the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn't right about how giraffes' necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. "Today," notes David Shenk, "any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . ."

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it's not the only one. We've learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that's introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? "It's natural to wonder," Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, "if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level." In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can't establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

It is a decade since the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published The Natural History of Rape. In the book, they made an argument that – however obnoxious at first glance – seemed, to many, to follow straightforwardly from the logic of natural selection. Evolution tells us that the traits that flourish down the generations are the ones that help organisms reproduce. Evolutionary psychology argues that there's no reason to exclude psychological traits. And since rape is indeed a trait that occurs all too frequently in human society, it follows that a desire to commit rape must be adaptive. There must be a genetic basis for it – a "rape gene", in the words of some media stories following the book's publication – because, in prehistoric times, those men who possessed the tendency would reproduce more successfully than those who didn't. Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was – to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin – "natural".

Understandably, the book was hugely controversial. But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations. If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection. It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices (because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah). Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable. But that was how many such findings – often better described as speculations – came to be believed. We're not exactly saying it's right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but . . . well, good luck trying to change millennia of evolved behaviour.

Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what's really been going on. They were always prone to telling "just-so stories" – spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was – and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was. (That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn't seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research.) And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate – of nature versus nurture – suddenly become shaky. It's not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a "mixture" of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of "nature" and "nurture" seem to be growing meaningless. What does "nature" even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants?

This is one central argument of Shenk's new book, subheaded Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong. All our popular notions about talent and "genetic gifts", he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods's ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods's golfing abilities. (Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable.)

"What all this evidence shows is that we need a much more subtle and nuanced understanding of Darwinism and natural selection," Shenk says. "I think that's inevitably going to happen among scientists. The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere . . . it's really funny how difficult it is to have this conversation, even with a lot of people who understand the science. We're stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms" – such as nature and nurture – "that we have."

Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk's disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems. As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.

"If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now," writes Shenk, "that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall." Not so now.

And then there is Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher. I started reading What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, one morning, along with that day's first coffee. A few pages later, as the coffee kicked in, I grasped with astonishment what Fodor had done. He hadn't just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought – he'd uncovered a glaring flaw in the whole notion! Natural selection, he explains, simply "cannot be the primary engine of evolution". I got up and refilled my cup. But by the time I returned, his argument had slipped from my grasp. Suddenly, he seemed obviously wrong, tied up in philosophical knots of his own creation. I alternated between these two convictions. Was Fodor's critique so devastatingly correct that his critics – Dawkins, Dennett, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and many others – simply couldn't see it? Had he actually managed to . . . but then it slipped away again, vanishing into mental fog.

I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. "Can't be done," he shot back. "These issues really are complicated. If we're right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we've been making for 150 years, that's not because it's a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It's a really complicated issue."

Fodor's objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn't "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce? The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. "Through the process of natural selection, the 'fittest' survive, [but] who are the 'fittest'? The ones who survive!" she sneers. "Why, look – it happens every time! The 'survival of the fittest' would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community."

This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism. In fact, though, it's entirely possible for scientists to measure fitness using criteria other than survival, and thus to avoid circular logic. For example, you might hypothesise that speed is a helpful thing to have if you're an antelope, then hypothesise the kind of leg structure you'd want to have, as an antelope, in order to run fast; then you'd examine antelopes to see if they do indeed have something approximating this kind of leg structure, and you'd examine the fossil record, to see if other kinds of leg died out.

Fodor's point is more complex than this, although it's also possible that it is not really a point at all: several reviews of the book by professional evolutionary theorists and philosophers have concluded that it is, indeed, nonsense. As far as I can make out, it can be summarised in three steps. Step one: Fodor notes – undeniably correctly – that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive. Some just come along for the ride: for example, genes that express as tameness in domesticated foxes and dogs also seem to express as floppy ears, for no evident reason. Other traits are, as logicians say, "coextensive": a polar bear, for example, has the trait of "whiteness" and also the trait of "being the same colour as its environment". (Yes, that's a brain-stretching, possibly insanity-inducing statement. Take a deep breath.) Step two: natural selection, according to its theorists, is a force that "selects for" certain traits. (Floppy ears appear to serve no purpose, so while they may have been "selected", as a matter of fact, they weren't "selected for". And polar bears, we'd surely all agree, were "selected for" being the same colour as their environment, not for being white per se: being white is no use as camouflage if snow is, say, orange.)

Step three is Fodor's coup de grace: how, he says, can that possibly be? The whole point of Darwinian evolution is that it has no mind, no intelligence. But to "select for" certain traits – as opposed to just "selecting" them by not having them die out – wouldn't natural selection have to have some kind of mind? It might be obvious to you that being the same colour as your environment is more important than being white, if you're a polar bear, but that's because you just ran a thought-experiment about a hypothetical situation involving orange snow. Evolution can't run thought experiments, because it can't think. "Darwin has a theory that centrally turns on the notion of 'selection-for'," says Fodor. "And yet he can't give an account – nobody could give an account – of how natural selection could distinguish between correlated traits. He waffles."

Those of us baffled by this argument can take solace in the fact that we're not alone. The general response to Fodor among evolutionary thinkers has been a mixture of derision and awkwardness, as if one of their previously esteemed colleagues had entered the senior common room naked. Says Dennett, via email: "Jerry Fodor's book is a stunning demonstration of how abhorrence of an idea (Jerry's visceral dislike of evolutionary thinking) can derange an otherwise clever thinker . . . a responsible academic is supposed to be able to control irrational impulses, [but] Fodor has simply collapsed in the face of his dread and composed some dreadfully bad arguments." What Darwin Got Wrong, Dennett concludes, is "a book that so transparently misconstrues its target that it would be laughable were it not such dangerous mischief".

It would be jawdroppingly surprising, to say the least, were Fodor to be right. A safer, if mealy-mouthed, conclusion to draw is that his work acts as an important warning to those of us who think we understand natural selection. It's probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it's self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he'd been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we've come to think.

Further reading
• From Time magazine, an excellent piece on epigenetics: http://bit.ly/5Kyj5q
• The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, by David Shenk, is published by Doubleday. What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is published by Profile, price £20
• For more on "horizontal evolution" see New Scientist: http://bit.ly/4zzAsr
• Also from New Scientist, more on the role of viruses in evolution: http://bit.ly/bD4NLC

This article was amended on 19 March 2010. Genes undergo random mutations, rather than cause them (ninth paragraph). This has been corrected in the online version.

[Paki Phantom]

thanks. appreciate the appreciation. :)

Just read the whole thing. it is really interesting.

-----------------------------------------------

Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong

What if Darwin's theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar...ion-genes-wrong

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There's a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . "about a full day!" Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the "myth" of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he'd recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!

Inevitably, those of us who aren't professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn't waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin's theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or "intelligent design", and it's true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts. But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, "This is big, big stuff – perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene."

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn't, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country's northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man's grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren's lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody's eye.

It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it's generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called "modern synthesis" of Darwin's theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism's abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we've come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn't the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn't right about how giraffes' necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. "Today," notes David Shenk, "any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . ."

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it's not the only one. We've learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that's introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? "It's natural to wonder," Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, "if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level." In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can't establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

It is a decade since the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published The Natural History of Rape. In the book, they made an argument that – however obnoxious at first glance – seemed, to many, to follow straightforwardly from the logic of natural selection. Evolution tells us that the traits that flourish down the generations are the ones that help organisms reproduce. Evolutionary psychology argues that there's no reason to exclude psychological traits. And since rape is indeed a trait that occurs all too frequently in human society, it follows that a desire to commit rape must be adaptive. There must be a genetic basis for it – a "rape gene", in the words of some media stories following the book's publication – because, in prehistoric times, those men who possessed the tendency would reproduce more successfully than those who didn't. Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was – to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin – "natural".

Understandably, the book was hugely controversial. But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations. If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection. It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices (because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah). Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable. But that was how many such findings – often better described as speculations – came to be believed. We're not exactly saying it's right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but . . . well, good luck trying to change millennia of evolved behaviour.

Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what's really been going on. They were always prone to telling "just-so stories" – spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was – and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was. (That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn't seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research.) And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate – of nature versus nurture – suddenly become shaky. It's not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a "mixture" of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of "nature" and "nurture" seem to be growing meaningless. What does "nature" even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants?

This is one central argument of Shenk's new book, subheaded Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong. All our popular notions about talent and "genetic gifts", he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods's ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods's golfing abilities. (Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable.)

"What all this evidence shows is that we need a much more subtle and nuanced understanding of Darwinism and natural selection," Shenk says. "I think that's inevitably going to happen among scientists. The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere . . . it's really funny how difficult it is to have this conversation, even with a lot of people who understand the science. We're stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms" – such as nature and nurture – "that we have."

Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk's disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems. As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.

"If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now," writes Shenk, "that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall." Not so now.

And then there is Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher. I started reading What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, one morning, along with that day's first coffee. A few pages later, as the coffee kicked in, I grasped with astonishment what Fodor had done. He hadn't just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought – he'd uncovered a glaring flaw in the whole notion! Natural selection, he explains, simply "cannot be the primary engine of evolution". I got up and refilled my cup. But by the time I returned, his argument had slipped from my grasp. Suddenly, he seemed obviously wrong, tied up in philosophical knots of his own creation. I alternated between these two convictions. Was Fodor's critique so devastatingly correct that his critics – Dawkins, Dennett, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and many others – simply couldn't see it? Had he actually managed to . . . but then it slipped away again, vanishing into mental fog.

I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. "Can't be done," he shot back. "These issues really are complicated. If we're right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we've been making for 150 years, that's not because it's a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It's a really complicated issue."

Fodor's objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn't "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce? The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. "Through the process of natural selection, the 'fittest' survive, [but] who are the 'fittest'? The ones who survive!" she sneers. "Why, look – it happens every time! The 'survival of the fittest' would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community."

This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism. In fact, though, it's entirely possible for scientists to measure fitness using criteria other than survival, and thus to avoid circular logic. For example, you might hypothesise that speed is a helpful thing to have if you're an antelope, then hypothesise the kind of leg structure you'd want to have, as an antelope, in order to run fast; then you'd examine antelopes to see if they do indeed have something approximating this kind of leg structure, and you'd examine the fossil record, to see if other kinds of leg died out.

Fodor's point is more complex than this, although it's also possible that it is not really a point at all: several reviews of the book by professional evolutionary theorists and philosophers have concluded that it is, indeed, nonsense. As far as I can make out, it can be summarised in three steps. Step one: Fodor notes – undeniably correctly – that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive. Some just come along for the ride: for example, genes that express as tameness in domesticated foxes and dogs also seem to express as floppy ears, for no evident reason. Other traits are, as logicians say, "coextensive": a polar bear, for example, has the trait of "whiteness" and also the trait of "being the same colour as its environment". (Yes, that's a brain-stretching, possibly insanity-inducing statement. Take a deep breath.) Step two: natural selection, according to its theorists, is a force that "selects for" certain traits. (Floppy ears appear to serve no purpose, so while they may have been "selected", as a matter of fact, they weren't "selected for". And polar bears, we'd surely all agree, were "selected for" being the same colour as their environment, not for being white per se: being white is no use as camouflage if snow is, say, orange.)

Step three is Fodor's coup de grace: how, he says, can that possibly be? The whole point of Darwinian evolution is that it has no mind, no intelligence. But to "select for" certain traits – as opposed to just "selecting" them by not having them die out – wouldn't natural selection have to have some kind of mind? It might be obvious to you that being the same colour as your environment is more important than being white, if you're a polar bear, but that's because you just ran a thought-experiment about a hypothetical situation involving orange snow. Evolution can't run thought experiments, because it can't think. "Darwin has a theory that centrally turns on the notion of 'selection-for'," says Fodor. "And yet he can't give an account – nobody could give an account – of how natural selection could distinguish between correlated traits. He waffles."

Those of us baffled by this argument can take solace in the fact that we're not alone. The general response to Fodor among evolutionary thinkers has been a mixture of derision and awkwardness, as if one of their previously esteemed colleagues had entered the senior common room naked. Says Dennett, via email: "Jerry Fodor's book is a stunning demonstration of how abhorrence of an idea (Jerry's visceral dislike of evolutionary thinking) can derange an otherwise clever thinker . . . a responsible academic is supposed to be able to control irrational impulses, [but] Fodor has simply collapsed in the face of his dread and composed some dreadfully bad arguments." What Darwin Got Wrong, Dennett concludes, is "a book that so transparently misconstrues its target that it would be laughable were it not such dangerous mischief".

It would be jawdroppingly surprising, to say the least, were Fodor to be right. A safer, if mealy-mouthed, conclusion to draw is that his work acts as an important warning to those of us who think we understand natural selection. It's probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it's self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he'd been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we've come to think.

Further reading
• From Time magazine, an excellent piece on epigenetics: http://bit.ly/5Kyj5q
• The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, by David Shenk, is published by Doubleday. What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is published by Profile, price £20
• For more on "horizontal evolution" see New Scientist: http://bit.ly/4zzAsr
• Also from New Scientist, more on the role of viruses in evolution: http://bit.ly/bD4NLC

This article was amended on 19 March 2010. Genes undergo random mutations, rather than cause them (ninth paragraph). This has been corrected in the online version.

Absolute rubbish interpretation of the studies! This is exactly why we need more scientists doing science journalism instead.
Every biologist knows that gene regulation has been the driving force in Evolution.

[Saeed Khan]

I posted an article; I guess from the Times Magazine, few years ago in which the scientists observed changes even in our genes due to our learned behavior. That is, inherited genes from our parents aren’t fixed and permanent as we believed but environment and our behavior can cause changes in them!

For example, placebo effect is well known. If we believe that a medicine will cure us; although it might only be a Calcium tablet, we still are cured! Similarly, our prayers and the belief that we will be cured may also have positive effects. Also, stronger the belief and trust, more effective might be the genetic level change and similarly the corresponding beneficial effects. Some cancer patients firmly believed that they would be cured and they did get well!

It seems that this research is continuing. Not only our genes might be in a constant flux but our kids may also inherit our behavior and habits the way they inherit our genes!

Few of the conclusions I draw are:

1) Our behavior: Not only our behavior becomes habits and causes changes even at the level of our genes, the behavior and genes of our kids may also be affected. This only doubles our responsibility to avoid all forms of addiction, learn how to manage stress, try to live in a cleaner environment, improve our diet, exercise, etc. After all, if the negative effects of our habits, environment and stress can cause earlier heart disease and cancer in us; unfortunately, it may do the same for our kids as well. At least for their sake we should stop smoking, etc. and get rid of our dirty or bad habits.

2) Interpretation of the Holy Quran: All those scholars who seem absolutely sure that the Holy Quran is for or against evolution or the survival of the fittest should desist from making such ‘final’ conclusions and let the language of the Holy Quran speak for itself.

3) Behavior improvement: The good news is that although our dirty habits and bad environment may cause genetic level damage in us and our kids may inherit such traits, the good habits may also make positive or good changes down to the genetic level in us and our future generations may also benefit.

[Bilal]

Awesome thread, I dont know if video documentary links are allowed but I highly recommend this one, Dangerous Knowledge:
http://forum.pakistanidefence.com/index.ph...t&p=1224580

since reply to your post was not gonna help the thread, I thought I might just add it to your post :)

Video documentary links are not allowed as there is another topic just for that. This topic is more about written material. But referring back to documentary topic is allowed. Its done to keep a little more order thats all. I have posted your documentary link in documentary section and changed linked to it. So everything is good.

And I do appreciate you guys reading this stuff. I will also appreciate if you can find good books online and post links.

Thanks.

Edited by sobank, 23 March 2010 - 03:25 PM.

[Bilal]

Crash Proof

http://books.google.ca/books?id=BXodkDAR-w...;q=&f=false

Discusses on a very fundamental level what is wrong with the current world economic structure. After reading this book I have become convinced that we need not only a complete overhaul of the the world economic model, but we need to completely rethink our understanding of the dynamics of economies.

[sobank]

Tons of information, images and videos. Please go visit these sites for all that stuff in the sky :)


Hubble image gallary
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/

Hubble's own site
http://hubblesite.org/

[Oracle]

Here are two best series to learn science for your kids. Read sobank post#36 for quick downloading information.

I cant find a better gift for this thread.



Bill Nye the science guy-All 100 episodes

Mr. Wizard, all 32 episodes.


Please visit the following link for the links
http://forum.pakistanidefence.com/index.ph...t&p=1237475


sorry schmuck only written matterial and photos. but dont worry your effort is not wasted. the links are in doc thread with your credit.

Edited by sobank, 29 May 2010 - 01:19 AM.

[Saeed Khan]

Thank you schmuck. These episodes can be quite useful for the future generations.

[sobank]

oh what the hell man. I just wrote a guide for quick downloading without hassel and it was not saved.  

ok this will be shorter guide now. so forgive me for not being clear.
but first thing first..... It wont work in rapidshare :(

1- download and use firefox.
2-download and install "downloadthemall" plugin/extension.
3-go >tools >downloadthemall tools>downloadthemall
4-select links tabs in new screen.
5-expand fast filtering and type rapidshare in the empty field and check disable filter box.

What you did here is just select all the rapidshare links on this page you can scroll through the links on the new screen and make sure that only rapidshare links are checked for downloading.

6-now click start and all of rapidshare files will be downloaded to your selected location.

Edited by sobank, 29 May 2010 - 01:09 AM.

[sobank]

Jf-17 news in airforce related magazine:
http://www.mediafire.com/?hmymmijytyz

All thanks to Hala

[sobank]

Back in 90's I read a book about a Pakistani general and I was stage of being impressed - I was in submission.

Thanks to saeed sahab today you can read  about the myth of afghan war and a figure which was more elusive than Gen. Zia shaheed himself.

Fateh
http://fatehazam.com/book.htm


Thanks again saeed khan sahab

[sobank]

This is a little article about dictators. Enjoy :)

Dictatorsh|ts

Right now, America is under the control of an Islamic Communist who is hell-bent on destroying the country with his nefarious scheme to allow poor people to see doctors. Great Britain has a leader who gives eerie credibility to David Icke's theory that we're being controlled by a race of alien lizards wearing skin suits. But like all things, the merit of our politicians is relative and a quick glance around the world might just show that really, they could be much, much worse.

King Mswati III of Swaziland
Mswati is the last absolute monarch left in Africa although he is said to lean heavily on advice from his mother Indlovukazi (Great She-Elephant). In total control of national governance his policies so far have included trying to ban women under the age of 50 from having sex to prevent AIDS. A fortnight after the ban came into effect he married a 12 year old girl. For breaking the law he fined himself the price of one cow.
Which he paid easily. He is currently estimated to have a personal fortune of $100 million and it the sole trustee to a $10 billion(!) fund left by his father. Swazilands GDP per capita is just under $3,000.
Amazingly his sex ban failed to prove effective so he put forward a program of "sterilization and branding" for people with HIV. Waiting to see how that one turns out. With such innovative health care it may surprise you to find out that Swaziland is right at the bottom of the average life expectancy table. If Mswati's citizens make it to the age of 40 they can consider themselves as senior citizens. The average life expectancy is 39.6 years. 40% lower than the world average.

His Excellency Saparmurat Niyazov Türkmenbasy, President of Turkmenistan and Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers
Although it falls short of Idi Amin's fantastic title "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor[B] Idi Amin Dada, VC,[C] DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular" Niyazov's official title is still magnificently grandiose and thoroughly fitting for the kind of ego-maniac who renamed the month of January after himself. (he later renamed other months after his favorite family members and days of the week after Turkmenistan heroes.)
You can't blame him for being a bit full of himself though. He became president for life after receiving a whopping 99.9% approval vote. Absolutely no guns held to voters head in that election.
With such a amazing vote of confidence he pressed forward with his vision for the country.
First he tried to construct an ice palace near the capital. In the middle of a desert. Unfortunately engineers were unable to create ice that doesn't melt in heat and the project remains unfinished. Unbowed, he began construction on a Disneyland style theme park based around himself which also was unfortunately doomed as after his death in 2006 his successor didn't consider it a priority. Shame. But happily Niyazov's legacy lives on in his many inspired laws.
Highlights include:
Banning lip syncing from musical performances.
Banning long hair (possible grudge again Milli Vanilli?)
Banning gold teeth.
Banning news reporters from wearing make up.

Isaias Afewerki President of Eritrea
One of his first acts in power was to imprison soldiers who had been wounded fighting for him after they complained about the quality of the military barracks they were stationed in. Iraq vet's take note.
Then he postponed elections by "three or four decades" because they "polarize society" and turned a minor border skirmish with Ethiopia into a substantial war which he repeatedly refused to end peacefully. He then began a Stalin-esque purge of friends who dared utter the democracy word sending them to the gallows. Eritrea is the only country worse than North Korea for freedom of speech.

Denis Sassou Nguesso President of Congo-Brazzaville
Although British politicians have recently made the front pages with their expenses scandal none of them can hold a candle to Nguesso. The United Kingdom sent £100,000 in aid, earmarked for medicine, which Nguesso used to fund a 5 day stay in the New York Waldorf Hotel. Helping himself to rappers favorite Cristal and racking up a $14,000 room service bill. When it came time for a family holiday he returned and booked out 44 rooms racking up another $150,000 bill. His largesse did not go unnoticed and the World Bank were so pissed that they delayed the a financial aid package for the Congolese indefinitely.
So not only did he steal money that was meant to help his citizens, he waved his dick in the face of the international community so much he essentially stopped any more coming for the foreseeable future. He's also under investigation for accepting tens of millions in bribes from oil companies.

Kim Jong il Supreme Leader of Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Although technically his dead father is higher ranking (Kim Il-sung Eternal President of Democratic People's Republic of Korea) Kim Jong been the North Koreans "Dear Leader" for the last 16 years. He's used that time to develop a cult of personality that has raised him to being a virtual deity.
Propaganda says that his birth was accompanied by a new star in the sky and double rainbows and its now celebrated as the most important holiday of the year. The weather of North Korea is controlled by his current mood and he is said to shoot, on average, 4 holes-in-one every 18 hole round of golf.
He is a huge movie buff and is rumored to own the worlds largest collection of videotapes. His enthusiasm spilled over into international kidnapping when he ordered the abductions of a South Korean director and actress with the hope they would kickstart a North Korean film industry.
All the golf and Gozilla movie marathons mean that he hasn't been paying too much attention to the living conditions of his subjects and North Korea is ranked right at the bottom of Amnesty Internationals list of country you really don't want to live in if you enjoy not being terrorized by power drunk soldiers while starving to death.

Omar al-Bashir President of Sudan
You've heard of Darfur? Thats this guys baby. The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for al-Bashir regarding genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. A full house for any self respecting dictator. He declined to arrest himself and remains in power.

The Pope - Vatican city
This spiritual home to the worlds humble and poor is one of the richest countries on earth. Ruling by way of absolutist decrees received from his imaginary friend Pope Benedict holds a large percentage of the worlds population under his thrall.
Allow to to come over all Glenn Beck for a moment............
The Pope lives in the Vatican right. Well If you split the word Vatican down to "Vati - Can" you may notice that Vati is pretty close to the German word for father "vater." Did I mention the Pope is German? A GERMAN. So what does that give us?
Father - can.
Father is another name for a priest!!!
Priest - can!
Add on the obviously implied "molest children" and you have Pope Benedict - Dictator for life in the nation state of Priests Can Molest Children. Am I the only one seeing this PEOPLE?

http://www.kontraband.com/blog/23265/Dictatorshts/

[Magnus]

The Way of the Sniper

The guy to the left — the guy you might not have even noticed at first — is Scott Tyler. What he does, and does well, is something that is essential in every war we’re fighting. And that is: eliminate important targets, sometimes from extraordinary distances, without anybody knowing he was ever there.
By Rick Telander



There is a decision you must make. The world is vast and unstructured. In it, things move seemingly at random. There comes a narrowing, a focusing, as the aperture reduces and reduces. The act, combined with training and skill and vision and, yes, philosophy, leads to a gradual, noiseless ratcheting down and down, like ripples in a pond going backward toward the pebble, closer and closer, smaller and smaller, the chaos dissipating into a tiny center of detailed clarity. And then the trigger.

Scott Tyler has been out of the Navy Seals for two years, but you don’t simply forget what you did best. And what he did best, other than lead men in high-stakes combat, was aim a high-caliber, long-range rifle at a “target,” be that machine, structure, or, most relevantly, a man, and, in Tyler’s words, “take it out.” That is what snipers do. Their craft — a part of warfare since the emergence of the Kentucky rifle during the American Revolution and in some ways even further back, to whenever the first accurate, long-distance bow shooter or rock thrower appeared — might seem outdated in an era of smart bombs and computer-controlled drones. But that is not the case. In the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq, where the sporadically appearing plainclothes enemy might be far away, amid protective rocks, or close-up amid innocent citizens, stealth killing and accurate killing — the sniper’s trademarks — are essential.

To shoot a man from a distance is a fascinating, awe-inspiring thing. It is nearly mythic in its godlike bequeathal of power. You are here, and he is there, and the connective and intensely private embrace is one of death. The two parties are linked by the flight of a tiny projectile traveling at supersonic speed, arriving to do its work well before the sound does and a moment after the powder flash and smoke are visible. To see that brief flash and to recognize, if only for a millisecond, that you will be the recipient of the explosive message, after which you will cease to exist, must be among the more horrifying recognitions there is. If the chamber noise is reduced and the blast light dulled (Tyler and the men he directed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines generally used silencers or suppressors on the barrels of their rifles), the impact — a far-off head exploding, an arm abruptly detached, a body suddenly pierced by an invisible drill — occurs in a world without context or reason for the enemy, and is therefore not just terrifying but dispiriting.

“Long-range target interdiction: That’s the two-dollar phrase,” says Tyler, who sometimes speaks so quietly that you find yourself studying his lips. “In a conventional war you’re on the battlefield, and if you look over and your buddy’s head blows up and then you see another friend go down, it freaks you out. It demoralizes you; it makes you question things. It’s a psychological thing. You, as a sniper, try for the highest-ranking person, if you can, to create that chaos. But in an insurgency, as we have now, when the enemy comes out in ones and twos, sometimes right in the cities, without ever being a big force, it’s all ambush. So it can be better to have snipers rather than a man on every corner. A sniper team can stay hidden.’’

Tyler now works when he can as a security consultant — a job that still takes him to hot spots such as Somalia and Iraq. His company, Qaletaqa Corps, works with various governments, tracking down terrorists and war criminals, and with private companies, planning logistics for their personnel traveling to volatile regions, sometimes even accompanying them. He was also recently featured in a short-lived reality show on NBC called The Wanted. In that show, Tyler and three other specialists tracked down alleged terrorists and killers now living freely in other countries. Instead of a rifle, Tyler carried a passport and a camera. The trouble with the show was it made no final sense. The evildoers had found legal loopholes so they could live openly, and Tyler sure as hell couldn’t go to, for instance, Norway, where the first episode occurred, and blast a dude from half a mile away. Though that would have been something.

—

At 5-foot-11, 185 pounds, Tyler is modestly sized, if muscular, with thick blacksmith hands, dark hair showing flecks of gray, and green eyes, one of which — the left — bears a birthmark that sometimes lends that iris a golden hue. Maybe the defect is actually a gift, because Tyler has 20/20 vision in his right eye but 20/15 in the left.

That’s not the only unusual thing about Tyler, 36, a man who likes to meditate and contemplate big philosophical issues, such as the meaning of life. “People expect him to be so macho,’’ says his mother, Kate, a former hippie who made jewelry and traveled about with her son in a lime-green school bus in southern California before settling down with second husband Darrol Rice in Rio Linda. “They expect that of a sniper. But he’s so thoughtful, so open to suggestions, so concerned about others. When he was a little boy, he found five dollars on the playground, and he turned it in. When he went to sign up for the Marines, I thought we were going to the mall so he could hit me up for comic books.”

He was 18 then, in 1991, coming off a restless high school career. (He was kicked out after spending more time surfing than studying, but eventually earned his GED.) He served a tour in Somalia, got out in 1996, and enrolled at the University of California–Berkeley. The elite, famously liberal school wasn’t exactly clamoring for a surfer-dropout-turned–G.I. Joe, but Tyler cajoled military officials into writing him letters of recommendation. He settled on chemistry as his major, “because chemistry had kicked my ass’’ in some early classes there, and he wasn’t backing down from it again. After a year he had a 3.8 GPA, but his view of life from the chemistry lab was not fulfilling.

He had had a dream: He would continue on to medical school, become a doctor, and, rifle hanging in the back of his truck, work on an Indian reservation, where he would save lives while hiking into the roughest terrain. “I wanted to help people,” he says. “But I was managing an apartment building and spending 80 to 90 hours a week studying. For what? So I could spend 80 to 90 hours a week studying in med school? I wanted to learn — knowledge for knowledge’s sake — but it was all so competitive for no reason, so full of backstabbing, just a meat grinder. I looked out the windows of the lab, and there were the hills. And I knew I wanted to be back around people I liked being around.”

So he switched his major to cognitive science — “why we think what we think,” he says — and began hanging out with professors, “talking and trying to learn from them.” One afternoon, Tyler and I visit his favorite professor at Berkeley, a cheerful man named John Matsui, the head of the scholars program in the department of integrative biology. As we sit in the campus coffee shop, Matsui says with something like awe, “I never had a student like Scott before. I knew you were intelligent. I saw that you would never quit. Your story was… different. Coming to school the way you did. Your desire to learn.”

Even so, after he graduated in 2000, Tyler had had enough of school, and he felt himself drawn back to the military, but this time in more of a thinking role. He joined the navy to become a SEAL, one of those supersoldiers trained not only to fight on sea, on land, or in the air, but also to operate more independently. “I wanted to work in as small a unit as possible,” he says. “I wanted to take all my determination, intentions, and skill and deliver it as precisely as I could — on the tip of a single bullet.”

And that is how a sniper was born.

—

Photograph by John Lee
Photograph by John Lee

—

Part of being a great sniper is having the ability, the mind-set, to blend in, to disguise oneself, to become part of the landscape, to feel and react like soil, like leaves blowing in the wind. In The Ultimate Sniper, a technical guide for advanced snipers that Tyler references again and again, there is a section on Ghillie suits, the camouflage outfits that are designed to resemble the surrounding landscape. “A properly made Ghillie suit so well conceals the wearer that it never fails to impress first-time viewers,’’ writes the author, retired army special forces major John L. Plaster. At sniper school, when an instructor talks about the suits, the point is reinforced when, after a spell, an innocuous part of the ground in front of the recruits slowly rises up and becomes human.

“The most important thing about a Ghillie suit is that you can attach other things to it,” says Tyler. “It has loops everywhere, and you gather whatever’s in your environment — leaves and grass and branches — and tape or string or zip-tie them on. It’s a layman’s myth that you cover yourself with burlap and you look like Chewbacca and that’s that.”

Snipers, whenever possible, work as two-man teams — one man spotting with a powerful scope, another shooting. But often even harder than shooting is the act of getting within range. It consists of patience almost beyond belief. There is the high crawl, the elbow crawl, the low crawl, and the sniper crawl. “The sniper crawl is the lowest, slowest movement technique…” Plaster writes, “used when movement must be so slow that there is no visible action to detect. [The sniper] creeps along, only four inches per move, using just fingers and toes to propel himself.” With a rifle, of course.

Then come the difficult decisions. “I liked the cut-and-dry, liked it if a guy had a gun and was shooting at our troops, and we shot him,” says Tyler. “It’s a situation of less ambivalence. Nobody wants to go out and murder someone. You don’t shoot just because you can. You have the trigger depressed and there is that final quarter-pound of pressure, and if you make a bad call.… Well, a ‘bad kill’ can create more insurgents, bad feelings, an international incident. But the biggest thing is, you have to live with it.’’

Tyler has won two bronze stars for valor. The first one stemmed from a 2003 incident in which his sniper team was providing support for a unit taking down a Taliban stronghold in the Afghanistan mountains. “We got into a combat situation and had to shoot our way through it,” says Tyler, reluctant to say more. It’s the second bronze star, though, that illustrates how gray the decision making in the field can get. That one came after a 2005 firefight in the Philippines, where he and other U.S. soldiers had been sent to assist the government in hunting down extremists. The document that accompanied that award notes that Tyler “without regard for his own personal safety…led a two-man element to rescue four injured personnel.” The truth is that Tyler came damned close to disobeying orders, since he was supposed to be an “observer,” not a combatant. He and another SEAL used two small boats to go up a river, firing all the way, to pull out ambushed and wounded Filipino troops. It was political dynamite, but human grace. Tyler could have been court-martialed as easily as decorated.

“The men had been shot up; they were bleeding out,” he says. “I got on the phone with the captain back at the base, and he wanted us to wait. He didn’t want to make the call, politically. Then my phone fell in the water. It kind of slipped out of my hand. Even now I don’t know if I did it on purpose.” Three of the four men he rescued survived, and Scott Tyler’s reputation spread.

The men in his platoons revered him, because he was meticulous, because he was loyal and smart, because he followed the rules but still thought philosophically and creatively. “I love the guy like a brother,” says Dave Hansen, a 13-year SEAL chief petty officer who served under Tyler in Iraq in 2005. “He constantly thought outside the box. Need something done? Just give him the facts and leave him alone. Because he was so good at so many things, he was always able to get us into combat, which is the point. I mean, there he is, knee-deep in craziness, smoking a lot of dudes, and doing it the right way. Mr. Rice” — Tyler recently changed his name from Rice back to Tyler, his birth name, as a way of reconnecting with his birth dad, but many of his fellow former soldiers still call him that — “he is the kind of guy who’s gonna save your ass. Maybe that’s what comes through in his art.’’

Oh yes, the art. Tyler is a sculptor; he learned welding from his birth father and has created some remarkably beautiful and thought-provoking moving sculptures out of stainless steel and stone. We visit a gallery in Stinson Beach where one of his pieces, Spatial Relationships, is on display in the yard, and the slightest breeze sets arms on the heavy, earth-toned metal-and-rock form into improbable, silent, delicate motion. “My art has to do with the positive spaces and negative spaces of a landscape,’’ Tyler explains. “That goes with the art of being a sniper. A person’s instinct, your eye, will go from positive space — a tree, a rock — to positive space. Negative space is the space in between. Deer and coyotes have the ability, with their coloring, to stand still in negative space, to hide in plain sight. Our eye notices straight lines, perfect circles, shiny things in the wild because they’re out of place. Those are not natural forms or shapes. I like things that blend into the landscape. I find nothing more beautiful than trees and rocks.’’

—

Scott Tyler was in a stone hut in Iraq’s Amdar province, east of Ramadi. This was in 2005, and the wrecked little building, about 10 feet by 12 feet, had been dubbed “the hot dog stand” by members of the SEAL team who occasionally used it for cover in the no-man’s-land of destruction. Tyler was with two men from his sniper team, observing the gray ambivalent scene outside, when they noticed a suspicious-looking local man checking out places where the SEALs sometimes set up. The man studied the road the military used regularly. He had on a robe, and it was impossible to see what he might be carrying underneath. The man looked at the hut. He walked closer and stared into the opening about five feet off the ground, at eye level, the place where the SEALs had built an observation deck out of bricks inside the hot dog stand. The man stared directly at Tyler, from six feet away, into his face.

Tyler was covered with his own handmade camouflage suit, spray-painted different colors “like a chameleon,” with a mottled front he had designed “not to look like a human, but to be natural and exist in negative space, to be invisible.” He had layers of mosquito netting covering his face, and he had backed into the shadows. The man could not see Tyler, could not even see his green eyes.

“Every hair on my body was standing on end,’’ Tyler says. “He could have tossed a grenade into that opening. But I need to see that he is a threat, absolutely. I need to know. He has to deserve to die.”

The man left and 20 minutes later returned with someone else. The first man began to dig a hole in the roadway with a trowel while the other served as a lookout. The first man dropped something into the hole, perhaps a bomb.

“I didn’t have a rifle, but I confirmed the target — both of those guys — and I cleared my men hot. It would be a simultaneous shoot. I counted down — ‘Three, two, one…’ and we took out the mine guy, about 75 meters away, and the lookout guy, about 125 meters away, at the same time. We had to do it precisely so that neither would be alerted. Within seconds a truck came flying down the road and picked up the farther body. But the first guy had fallen directly on top of the mine, or whatever it was. And it was a mine. We detonated it, and he disappeared.”

Tyler didn’t take those death shots, but he produced them. Though he won’t talk about it, it seems likely that snipers under his command have killed more than two dozen men, and he himself has killed maybe a half dozen or more. He won’t deny that. And maybe the body count is much higher. He doesn’t like to discuss it. “There are noncombatants in that number,” he says.

“If I shot somebody, or men under my command did, I took full responsibility for that. I know that helped the men, lifted the burden.” But what about the burden on him? “It sucks. It’s impossible, really, trying to be precise. Nothing is clear. I never had a textbook case. Never. You do your best. You follow the rules of engagement, your conscience. And then the next morning you wake up and you think, Oh, my God.”

—

At a shooting range outside Nevada City, far up in the wooded, mountainous eastern corner of California, not far from Reno, Tyler lies motionless on his belly in his khaki uniform, his heels pressed flat on the wooden platform, an Austrian-made Steyr Mannlicher .308 collector-grade sniper rifle pressed against his cheek. The rifle is brand-new and belongs to a range member named Rod. Next to Tyler is a box of Hornady 150-grain, lead-core, copper-jacketed, high-impact bullets with polymer tips. The tips are harder than the surrounding lead, so the synthetic red cone will be driven back on impact, causing a small explosion of lead fragments into the target, thus creating a larger hole at the back of a man than at the front. These bullets will travel more than half a mile per second.

Each rifle a sniper uses has unique characteristics that are compounded by the ammunition and many, many exterior factors. There is wind. There is humidity. There is the spin of the Earth. There is even the fact that as a rifle is fired, its barrel heats up, the metal contracts, and the bullets are propelled faster. As a sniper Tyler had a “quiver of rifles,” including a huge .50-caliber McMillan Brothers bolt-action, a .300 Winmag, and an MK 12, which he liked because it was light and small, though it “didn’t pack much of a punch” in the recoil. But his favorite was a CheyTac .408, a weapon he discovered late in his career and never used on a human. “It was accurate up to 2,500 yards,” he says. “The round had a very stable flight. Most rounds, when they go from supersonic to subsonic, start to tumble. This one tumbles and then restabilizes.”

I ask Tyler about the drama shots we see from snipers in the movies, like how they always seem to be shooting one another through their scopes. “It’s mostly Hollywood,” he says. “Head shots seldom happen. Anywhere from here to here” — he indicates the lower chest to the neck — “is good. There are so many variables. A shot that’s off by an inch at 100 yards will be off by 10 inches or more at a thousand yards.”

To ensure he’s as accurate as possible, Tyler meticulously charts the results from his practice shooting, logging all the variances he can think of — temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, direction. He’s looking for patterns — not just, say, how one type of bullet might vary from another, but how one particular batch of that bullet might vary. “That way when it comes down to game time you know what’s going to happen,” he says.

In combat Tyler never took a shot from more than 400 yards. But at a practice range in Idaho, he once hit a foot-square metal target from 1,600 yards. He was shooting across a valley, amid a furious wind and rain, and still hit the target on his first try. “We used the ballistic computers to deal with the environmental conditions,” he says matter-of-factly. That bullet was in the air for well over a second, rising, spiraling, descending, and fading to the right like a Tom Brady Hail Mary pass.

As astonishing as that feat was, it doesn’t come close to the long-distance killing record that was recently set by a Canadian sniper in Afghanistan. His fatal shot traveled 2,657 yards — more than a mile and a half. That bullet was in the air for four seconds and dropped 146 feet, while also curving to the side a good amount. “Those Canadians,” Tyler says, “they’re raising the bar pretty high.”

—

The range is now silent, even though 15 men have come by from various spots, shuffling and eager, to see the SEAL shoot.

“Going hot,’’ Tyler says.

He appears to have no breathing at all, no motion, no nothing. His feet are laid out flat on their sides behind him because snipers do not give the enemy even the sight of raised heels as targets.

There is an explosion, and then silence. He racks the bolt, and a bright, smoking casing pops out. He picks it up and lays it carefully to his right. He shoots again.

When he shoots, Tyler keeps both eyes open and lets the floating circular reticules hover like a halo around the target. “I try to get in a good pattern of breathing, try to relax everything. I’ll pull the slack off the trigger and know I’m at the point where only the mechanism is barely keeping the hammer back. You do not slap the trigger. You have to be in the moment. It’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience.” High-powered rifles are incredibly loud. They can be deafening. But Tyler has shot in war zones without muffling devices or earplugs. And a strange thing happens. “I don’t hear the blast,’’ he says. “I don’t hear anything.”

He mentions that many hunters — regular guys out for deer, longhorn, elk — flinch at the last moment, because they’re not relaxed. Because they’re thinking of what they’re doing. A sniper can do what he does because — after months and months of training and study and reflection — he knows that he has done it all before thousands of times, effortlessly. “It’s like golf,’’ Tyler says, “except every time you swing there’s an explosion in your face.”

This gun, a gun he never used before, misfires three times on the range, and the scope has never been accurately adjusted, but when we walk the 218 yards — two football fields, two end zones — to the target, the Styrofoam square has three patterns of three holes, each of which could be covered by a quarter.

It’s worth noting that Tyler does not especially like guns. He owns only a shotgun, which he has never shot and which he needed when he lived up in the hills of the Sierras with his wife and young daughter (he is recently divorced) as protection from meandering bears. He has never hunted, never killed an animal, never even shot at an animal.

Hemingway once wrote: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” But that is not strictly the case for Tyler. He left the service voluntarily, because he felt his principles were being violated by a superior’s decisions. It had to do with responsibility — his for the men under him. And he could not live with his conscience.

He admits he is still searching now, trying to come up with a lifestyle that embraces all that he is, all that he has done. Without a permanent address, he’s basically living in his pickup truck. He’s dating, and he wants to marry again, have more children, continue his art, and live “in a Mongolian yurt along the Pacific coast.”

A nice vision. But it must coexist with Tyler’s memory of, for instance, the first time he was fired upon in Baghdad: “We were in the back of a Humvee and I thought it was cigarette ashes flicked from a car. Heard nothing, had no idea where it was coming from. Just sparks skipping across stones.” The man riding next to Tyler said, “Motherfucker! The turret guy just hit me in the back of the head with the turret!” But the turret was high up. He’d been shot in the neck. By a sniper.

A man, a thinking man, a philosophical man, chooses to be a sniper, to fight his war from a distance. And why would he do so?

Maybe because he can say this, as Scott Tyler does: “If you’re shooting from 700 yards, you become the scope, you go down it, you become the tip of the bullet, you project yourself 700 yards. You’re there.”

—

This article originally appeared in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.
http://www.mensjournal.com/sniper