The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. (0:14 UT, 7:02 a.m. local solar time) on June 30, 1908 (June 17 in the Julian calendar, in use locally at the time).

The explosion was most likely caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 miles) above Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates for the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across.

This lecture of Žižek's hit something that I have not yet, prior to this realization, developed on my theories of posthuman sexuality. To get right down to it, the question would be this: isn't it interesting that in a society where almost every consensual sexual act is not only condoned but solicited — and even to the extent of using violence, corpses, and excremental objects — child porn still has to remain as a very strong taboo? Of course I by no means condone pedophilia, but what I find very ridiculous is the flimsy argument of age that is taken as a symbolic line separating those able of having the socio-cognitive function of consensus and those unable. I mean, we are today more than ever very diligent people when it comes to teaching children of consensus and openness — say for determining a weekend trip — and didn’t we say we believe Freud when he said children are really not asexual creatures? So shouldn’t the golden rule of postmodernity of "If all sides agreed, and it will bring pleasure to all sides, it's only politically correct to do" also apply here? What is going on?

With Žižek, I would assert that this fear of pedophilia is not as much a moral obligation as it is an excuse necessary in the construction of a sacred other. To put it frankly, one is able to commit all sorts of crimes and indulge in all sorts of obscene debaucheries and still mentally function only when one has faith that there is some part of the society that is still pure and innocent. This "sacred other" in today’s society is very well served by, of course, children. This total negation of the notion of child sexuality is precisely the move that enable us to exploit all kinds of perversion within us — as long as we love innocent children and keep them away from these dangers until they reach their 18th birthday, we can feel free to do anything we want to do.

Homosexual behaviour is largely shaped by genetics and random environmental factors, according to findings from the world's largest study of twins.

Writing in the scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm report that genetics and environmental factors (which are specific to an individual, and may include biological processes such as different hormone exposure in the womb), are important determinants of homosexual behaviour.

Dr Qazi Rahman, study co-author and a leading scientist on human sexual orientation, explains: "This study puts cold water on any concerns that we are looking for a single 'gay gene' or a single environmental variable which could be used to 'select out' homosexuality - the factors which influence sexual orientation are complex. And we are not simply talking about homosexuality here - heterosexual behaviour is also influenced by a mixture of genetic and environmental factors."

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned.

MEDIA FORUM/Moscow International Film Festival, Jury Special Mention (Moscow, Russia)

Fewer astronauts, more robots. That's the call from three European aerospace engineers, who argue that crewed satellite repair missions - like the ones flown by NASA to fix the ailing Hubble Space Telescope - are expensive, wasteful and set the wrong agenda for the space community.

The trio - Alex Ellery, Joerg Kreidsel and Bernd Sommer - argue in the journal Acta Astronautica that while such missions may be spectacular, they are unsustainable. Space agencies and satellite operators should instead be accelerating their efforts to develop robotic mechanics that can ply various Earth orbits, fixing errant satellites on demand. That way failing spacecraft can be repaired much more economically.

Over forty years ago, as Africa commenced the long and arduous process of decolonization, one of its foremost liberationist thinkers issued a prophetic warning. Frantz Fanon, himself a freedom fighter, wrote that the national leader in the postcolonial era should not 'fall back into the past and become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch leading up to independence.' His powerful descriptions of a once effective leader who gradually secedes from reality and betrays the people who entrust him with their future has resonances for the tragic situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself today. Having reduced a once significant anti-colonialism to a self-serving dogma, Robert Mugabe is the kind of fallen leader Fanon cautioned Africa against. Hesitant African leaders who are being called upon to intervene might want to reread his classic essay, 'The Pitfalls of National Consciousness' from that classic liberationist text, The Wretched of the Earth.

As Zimbabwe spirals into further political chaos, Mugabe and his party's addiction to power will further indulge an equally self-serving Western appetite for spectacles of Third World despotism. If Mugabe finds it convenient to invoke the demon of colonial oppression (which many Zimbabweans, barely thirty years out of colonial rule, remember all too well), he also enables British politicians to spout pieties condemning violence while their own nation is currently implicated in two dubious and bloody wars. Were the BBC and Channel 4 to show as many close-ups of injured and dead Iraqis as they do of Mugabe's maimed victims, criticism of violence against innocents might be somewhat more evenly distributed than it currently is. The British government turns accusatory fingers in Zimbabwe's direction while Mugabe shouts back anti-colonial slogans. It is a perfect symbiosis, a mutually convenient embrace of denunciation, with each party laying claim to the higher moral ground. The only innocents, however, are ordinary Zimbabweans.

Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

"Emily Hussein Nordling," her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

The American occupation of Iraq follows the same course as that of British rule after the First World War. At first there was imperial over-confidence following military victory and a conviction that what Iraqis did was of no importance. Then there was the shock and surprise of an Iraqi rebellion against the British in 1920 and the Americans after 2003. In both cases the occupiers responded by establishing an Iraqi national government but with limited powers. In 1930 under the Anglo-Iraqi treaty Iraq achieved nominal independence and joined the League of Nations but Britain retained two large bases and remained the predominant power in 1raq. Iraqi governments were tainted and lacked legitimacy because of Iraqis' perception that their rulers were foreign pawns until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.

America is now behaving in much the same way.

This totally absorbing book presents the best account ever written about the worst event to have ever befallen the British Isles. In the hands of John Hatcher, an English medievalist of sober and steady reputation who has for decades been squirreled away in one of the smaller, older, and least obtrusive of Cambridge colleges, the extraordinary tragedy of the great plague — which wiped out as much as 60% of the population of 14th-century Europe and killed an estimated 75 million worldwide — has been brought to life in a manner rarely attempted, and with a level of success even more rarely achieved.

Homer, in this period is the best example of this phenomenon. He is a brilliant caricature of the American working class. He has the gut of the American worker, the broken shoulders, and all the tastes that we associate with the American worker. Physically, he’s a lot like Michael Moore, himself a product of the working class in defeat. Homer takes no pride in his work, does his utmost to avoid it, and prefers drinking beer, sitting on the couch and watching TV. This is obviously the American worker in a period of defeat.

Susan Faludi has got an interesting article out arguing that Obama is being slurred as excessively feminine. And, well, hmm, Buzzflash (a left-wing organisation that loves Obama) now has the above fridge magnet for sale.

A recent national, first-of-its kind survey found that approximately six out of ten African-American children are unable to swim, nearly twice as many as their Caucasian counterparts while fifty-six percent of Hispanic and Latino children are unable to swim. The study by USA Swimming, the National Governing Body for the sport of swimming, found that the significant gap in swimming between races was due mainly to parental influence and socioeconomic factors.

Any minute now, someone will steal your car and drive it recklessly through crowded city streets on the way to an abandoned warehouse, where it will inevitably blow up in an epic shootout involving missile launchers and strippers. I'm not joking. That is a scenario from Grand Theft Auto IV, which recently set the record for the highest-grossing first week of sales for a video game — more than $500-million. According to politicians like Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York City's Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the growing popularity of the game poses a clear and present danger to American society.

Critics warn that anyone who plays the game will end up doing in the real world exactly what they do in the virtual world. In other words, watch out for a run on missile launchers and vigilante strippers.

My incredulous tone aside, I really don't see this issue as a joke. Frequently voiced claims about the entertainment media's deleterious influence on society reveal a pattern of human contempt and social hostility that is beginning to grow deep roots in our culture.

I'm not wagging my finger at the more than six million people in this country who are playing Grand Theft Auto IV, however. I'm pointing my finger at those people, particularly politicians, who continue to harp on the supposed social dangers of video games, and explicit media content in general. There are some very troubling ethical blind spots inherent in media-effects claims. We need a more socially aware form of ethical reasoning capable of framing our critical responses to media content.

Judging by the queries about the book from usually indifferent New York City Subway riders, The History of Human Rights certainly has an interested audience outside the academy. To be sure, considering the "slaughter bench of history," and the twentieth century's innovations of mass murder, the development and institutionalization of human rights the book charts represent remarkable achievements. But institutionalization is not the same as compliance. Thus what may account for my fellow travelers' interest is that, as immigrants from developing countries, they are probably well aware that the mid-twentieth century's human rights victories proved incapable of halting atrocities perpetrated after their ratification. For while an acknowledged genocide in western Sudan rages, economic disparities continue to increase globally as the richest, most powerful nation on earth is engaged in an ill conceived war initiated on the most flimsy pretexts. Speaking in this context, Micheline Ishay provides a necessary and refreshingly accessible study.

On Monday, the recording industry sent the National Association of Broadcasters -- the trade group representing the $16 billion a year AM-FM broadcasting business -- a can of herring to underscore that it believes its arguments against paying royalties are a red herring. The NAB says its members should not pay royalties because AM-FM radio "promotes" the music industry.

As you can see, the conference themes are broad enough that even those that do not typically write on war may find it a congenial place to present some of their work. I really enjoyed last year's symposium - the participants included not only philosophers but also political scientists, legal scholars, historians and serving and retired military officers of varying ranks (many of whom had, or were working toward, advanced degrees in philosophy or political science).

The theme for the opening plenary session is Morality versus Legality. Papers might involve issues such as:

* Do the moral constraints on both going to war and the conduct of war differ significantly from both domestic and international legal constraints?
* How should political leaders, military personnel, and the average citizen respond to a divergence of legal constraints from moral constraints?
* Should military personnel receive an education in the morality of war if this may render them aware that conformity to the laws of war may still involve morally unjustifiable conduct?
* Are states morally bound to uphold mutual defense treaties?
* Are mutual defense treaties like promises?
* Can states be bound by promises?

Four months ago the architect Daniel Libeskind declared publicly that architects should think long and hard before working in China, adding, "I won't work for totalitarian regimes." His remarks raised hackles in his profession, with some architects accusing him of hypocrisy because his own firm had recently broken ground on a project in Hong Kong. Since then, however, Mr. Libeskind's speech, delivered at a real estate and planning event in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has reanimated a decades-old debate among architects over the ethics of working in countries with repressive leaders or shaky records on human rights.

Isabella Rossellini, well known as a supermodel and movie star, is now making short films for mobile devices that illustrate the sex lives of dragonflies, earthworms and other creatures. But they are not like standard nature shows. In these films, which she researched with the help of Wildlife Conservation Society experts, she not only details unusual aspects of the critters' biology but also dresses up as them and mimics sex with paper cutouts. We asked Rossellini what she hopes to accomplish with the films on invertebrate love, dubbed Green Porno, which premiered May 5 on the Sundance Channel's Web site.

[...] Challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, "Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers." The psychologist who led the study called this new "infomania" a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of "continuous partial attention," which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are "constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing."

San Francisco's annual Arse Elektronika events sees the sexiest of the geeky (or the geekiest of the sexy) trying to outnerd each other with fabulous sexual inventions that are impractical, implausible, and exactly what you want for Christmas. It's also a great way for tinkerers of this sort to experiment with new and wacky ideas. Like, say, a vibrator that's hooked up to the U.S. Geological Survey and only buzzes when there's an earthquake somewhere in the world: you just plug it in, turn it on, and ... wait for a completely unpredictable natural disaster! Only trouble is that when your own "Big One" finally arrives, it's tempered by the realization that a building might have collapsed somewhere with people trapped inside. Talk about a buzzkill.

The ROFLcon convention, which seems to be part metahumor and part harrowing horror, sought to bring together every popular internet meme in one place at one time in the hopes of perhaps creating the biggest nerd salad that's ever been assembled. Guests included some of the faceless folks behind xkcd, 4chan, Leeroy Jenkins, the Tron Guy and too many people whose claim to fame include the letters lol.

Typical of any con, there were panel discussions with keynote speakers, some of which seemed like they were looking into how to turn these memes and related content into cold hard cash, which may have actually been practical. This was then stomped into the ground by the panel "LOLCATS: I CAN HAZ CASE STUDY?" which brought together no less than six human beings who have dedicated at least a portion of their lives to writing, organizing or studying captions on photos of cats. Real, actual people.

Imagine attending ROFLcon and having to go to the washroom only to find yourself at a urinal between a guy dressed like Tron and a guy who put the words "I can haz cheezburger" on a picture of a cat, both of whom are probably wealthier and more famous than you ever will be. No one's rofling now.

Two of the most important prophets confronting the oppression of black persons in America are Minister Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. They are black-chosen not white-approved leader. Thus their unique prophetic authority is revealed in the intense negative reactions to them by mainstream media, which are the guardians of America’s white-controlled hierarchy of access to political and economic power. The fact that the dominant press have singled them out for vilification is evidence of their validation as prophets speaking truth to power—rather than conventional religious leaders finessing compromise with the hierarchical status quo.

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

Think of it as a socially networked resource for those bitten by the travel bug. The basics should be pretty familliar to anyone who has ever used a classic social network. This one promises to provide a mix of user generated content and commercial content provided by the MairDumont group, a company that publishes many maps and travel guides, including the German version of the Lonely Planet guides. The commercial content seems to come from that groups Marco Polo guide books.

On the user content side, they have things like trip journals, and photo galleries. The also provide a way for you to combine the information you have collected for a trip into a PDF guide you can then print out and bring with you on the road.

New Labour is now reaping what it has itself sown: a cumulative weakening of the values of social solidarity, public service and altruism, which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend.

From Peter Mandelson's celebration of the 'filthy rich' and Tony Blair's contempt for public sector workers, through to Gordon Brown’s present refusal properly to reward public servants and his insistence that 'public service reform' means contracting out these services to private business, self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated.

I thought about the movie, what I have always thought about the TV show: Sex and the City is not so much about sex as it is about female friendship. And more particularly, how female friendship allows women to survive their relationships with men.

I am also always fascinated by how episode after episode of the source material TV show here - and to a lesser extent the movie - seems to be a Genesis mystery play built around God, rubbing the Divine eyes in the Garden and grimly forecasting to the Woman, "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will Lord it over you." SATC is nothing if isn't watching women desperately trying to obtain and then maintain the male focus.

"Darling, I missed you."

"Well," she replied, "You must fire again."

Assume that our young lady misunderstood his intentions, and that her lover was no wolf with a gun but sincerely in love: what was it that he missed about her? Assume, too, that he is not about to give a list mentioning the ironing, sewing and roof fixing: what was it that he missed about her as the one he loves?

The question of what is it that we love sets traps. Let him say her coquettish walk, the smile that lightens her face, her compassion and curves, her sense of colour and wonder at sunsets and rainbows. Add if he must the skilful ironing and roof fixing. Whatever is said, may she not rightly retort, "Ah, so you just love me for properties x, y, z and so on"? Once he has given such a list, it would seem she can then reasonably add, "So anyone else with those properties would have received your love? If we popped another person in my place, but with the same coquettish walk, smile and so on, then you would love her?" Her lover would be well-advised to pause for thought before answering this loaded question. At least in intimacy, we commit to its being this individual that we love, not just anyone of the desirable type. Yet it remains mysterious what the this is, if it does not come down to properties repeatable in others. [...]

A law that recently took effect there requires local governments and companies to measure the waistlines of those ages 40-75. If certain population targets aren't met, the governments and companies will face financial penalties.

Office art (especially office drawing) is a regular technique used by people in white-collar working situations. There may not necessarily be a creative impulse to create office work, but the impulse of overcoming general work boredom or the necessity to help office workers keeping focus during telephone conversations and/or office meetings. This page is dedicated to collecting office art.

1 The pitches in musical scales are likely derived from language. Turns out, aspects of spoken English and Mandarin correlate to the intervals between notes in a chromatic scale (the black and white piano keys in an octave). Is it music we love or the sound of our own voices?

2 When musicians improvise, the lateral prefrontal areas of their brains — responsible for planning and self-censorship — basically turn off. Meanwhile, the medial prefrontal cortex — linked to self-expression and activities like telling a story about yourself — lights up.

3 Getting "Eye of the Tiger" stuck in your head is the result of a glitch in your auditory cortex. This part of your brain processes sounds and stores them for later recall. It powers up and can start crooning uncontrollably after hearing just a few notes of a familiar tune. Want it to stop? Listen to the whole song or do some math.

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"Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this," says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. "I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into."

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Both advocates and opponents of nation building say that the United States played a key role in helping post-war Germany become a democracy. In fact, a close look reveals that, from the standpoint of democratic nation building, the U.S. occupation of Germany is actually a lesson in what not to do.

This seems a very unusual move from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) they are offering to pay $1000000 to the first group to develop commercially viable vat-grown meat.

While it is understandable why PETA would champion this (since vat meat would remove in principle many (weak) justifications for meat eating. However it seems in contrast with many of their previous stands, the most obvious issue being that this will almost certainly involve animal testing... Especially since they want it to taste the same as existing meat...

"It is still a mystery, really," says UBC computer science professor Prof. Dinesh Pai. "No one has ever completely mapped out the processes at the level of specific neurons, muscles and tendons."

Pai is part of a UBC team leading an international initiative to do just that. "Essentially, we are reverse engineering the brain to produce the first working computational model of the complex interplay between our minds and our bodies."

A Bay Area lawmaker is pushing a new bill that would force federal regulators to ratchet down the volume of commercials... British regulators approved similar rules last month that require broadcasters to limit the 'maximum subjective loudness' of TV ads after receiving complaints.

Vienna avant garde circa 1897: http://tinyurl.com/5rro9o, Vienna avant garde circa 2008: http://www.monochrom.at

Abraham Lincoln never said, "You cannot fool all the people all the time." Thomas Jefferson never said, "That government is best which governs least." And Horace Greeley never said, "Go west, young man." In They Never Said It, Paul Boller, Jr., and John George examine hundreds of misquotations, incorrect attributions, and blatant fabrications, outlining the origins of the quotes and revealing why they should be consigned to the historical trashcan. Many of the misquotes are quite harmless. Some are inadvertent misquotes that have become popular (Shakespeare actually said, "The best part of valor is discretion"), others, the inventions of reporters embellishing a story (Franklin Roosevelt never opened a speech to a DAR group with the salutation, "My fellow immigrants"). But some of the quotes, such as Charles Darwin's supposed deathbed recantation of evolution, are blatantly dishonest and falsify the historical record. And others are chillingly vicious, filled with virulent racial and religious prejudices that completely distort the views of the person supposedly quoted and spread distrust and hatred among the gullible. These include the forged remarks attributed to Benjamin Franklin that Jews should be excluded from America, and the fabricated condemnation of Catholics attributed to Lincoln.
An entertaining and yet thought-provoking book, They Never Said It sorts out a great deal of history and sets it right, going beyond a mere catalog of popular misconceptions to reveal how conservatives and liberals, atheists and evangelists, all have at times twisted and even invented the words of eminent figures to promote their own ends. It is the ultimate debunking reference, a perfect complement to handbooks of quotations.

Every day, the snuff picture sites on the internet display pictures of people, and sometimes animals, that died in the most unusual circumstances. In this gigantic photo depot I also discovered an image of the remains of the head of an American who, after a short morning visit to his office, left his workplace in order to leave a trail of carnage at a nearby supermarket and finally to kill himself. Somehow the police photo landed on the website, and below it was a commentary unobtrusively written in Times New Roman font: "Maybe his inkjet printer had a paper jam." Who knows? In office space no one can hear you scream.

The first album by the German punk group Abwärts, released in 1980, carried the wonderful palindrome KOMA/AMOK as its title. This antithetical pair outlined two approaches for the punk movement's reaction to the capitalist system and its pressure to succeed: either against oneself, or against others. The alternative culture magazine Slam writes: "Maybe the world seemed and seems no longer to be changeable, save that one withdraw fully into a depressive waking coma or that one let out – in the extreme case – all of one's pent up aggressions in a hypertrophic burst of violence." If one opts for one of these two alternatives, the solution of passive autoaggression is far more common. The probability that a man in Germany will run amok is around 1 million to 1, while for women the probability is 20 million to 1. Running amok is a male-hegemonial problem.

Faced with the flimsiest of concepts, he had to take it by both ends and pull until he stretched it out to two and a quarter hours. Two and a quarter! When Garbo made "Anna Karenina," in 1935, she got happy, unhappy, loved, left, and under the train in less than a hundred minutes, so how the hell are her successors supposed to fill the time? To be fair, there are four of them—banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring.

This project aims at creating a robot capable of drawing artistic portraits. The application is purely entertaining and based on existing tools for face detection and image reconstruction, as well as classical tools for trajectory planning of a 4 DOFs robot arm. The innovation of the application lies in the care we took to make the whole process as human-like as possible. The robot's motions and its drawings follow a style characteristic to humans. The portraits conserve the esthetics features of the original images. The whole process is interactive, using speech recognition and speech synthesis to conduct the scenario.

Suppose you are a resident of a planet in Alpha Centauri. Back on Earth, a friend enters your name in a lottery in which your chance of winning the prize of a million dollars is one in a million. If you win the lottery, your probability of winning collapses instantaneously to unity, and your wealth increases instantaneously by a million dollars. But it takes four years for the news, traveling at the speed of light, to reach you and your Centauri bank. You can’t start spending the money until that happens. That’s how it is in quantum physics. The collapse of the abstract wave function is just a mathematical artifice. Even though this happens at faster than the speed of light, any signal and other practical result will be limited by relativity and the laws of conventional physics.

The development of palaeoparasitology in Japan has occurred in recent decades. Despite the fact that archaeology in Japan has been slow to develop techniques for excavating ancient toilets, important information about the development of sanitation has been derived from the analysis of a few sites. This shows that the earliest people had very simple methods of sanitation. As populations increased, sanitation became more complex. Ditches surrounding early towns were used for excrement disposal. Eventually distinct toilets were developed followed by cesspit type toilets and flushing toilets. The parasites recovered from these toilets include many species that infect humans today. These parasite spectra reflect local use of aquatic, marine, and land animals. Fecal borne disease was an increasing problem as represented by whipworm and ascarid roundworm eggs. Interestingly, ascarid roundworms were absent in the earliest cultures and only became common with rice agriculture. Finds of pollen and seeds in toilet sediments reveal the use of medicinal plants to control the emerging problem of parasites.

Transforming Freedom is a Vienna-based project that tries to build up an archive of interviews, focusing on digital culture, its technical, political, theoretical and artistic trends and historical backgrounds; like an oral history of the digital age. [...] Like an interview with Hartmut Pilch about Software Patents. Hartmut founded the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) and gives insights into the history of patent law, the theoretical shortcomings of the concept of software patents and their consequences.

Dust – often thought of as an impediment to lunar exploration – could be put to good use to build giant telescopes on the Moon – perhaps some large enough to fill entire craters, says a team of US researchers.

The team, led by Peter Chen of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US, has devised a simple method to create a concrete-like substance using a mixture of carbon nanotubes, epoxy and a crushed rock material that NASA uses as a stand-in for Moon dust.

Using the mixture, they built a 30-centimetre disc. Then they added more liquid epoxy to its surface and spun it, coating it with aluminium in a vacuum. They believe the process could be scaled up to produce 20- to 50-metre-wide telescopes on the Moon.

The U.S. government, in collaboration with the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic, is very close to sealing a deal for a "defensive missile shield." According to the plan initiated by the U.S., ten GMD-variant interceptor missiles will be located in Poland, and an X-band radar will be located in the Czech Republic, 55 miles southwest of the capital of Prague. But there is a catch.

In April, an opinion poll showed that two-thirds of Czechs were against the U.S. missile shield plans. Two Czech protesters, Jan Tamas and Jan Bednar, have gone on a hunger strike that has now entered the fourth week. Bednar has been hospitalized once and diagnosed with liver failure. Still, both activists continue the nonviolent protest demanding that the voices of Czech citizens be heard.

A former employee of a Tennessee insurance company is objecting to a "ceremony" held at the construction site of a new building because it called on "the gods on the structure" for "good fortune and fertility."

The report on the ceremony came in an e-mail from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, which is constructing a new nearly $300 million office building at Chattanooga.

A spokeswoman for the company told WND the report comes apparently from an employee dispatched by the company to celebrate the "topping" ceremony of the building, with the report then transmitted to the insurance company's e-mail list.

"Upon arriving at the construction site we were greeted by the workers preparing to lift this tree with the crane. Why were they lifting the tree to the top of building one? Well according to the Scandinavian tradition from long ago, after the final foundation is complete you are to raise a tree to the top of a building to bless it. It was to 'bless' the house with fertility. But people still use the tradition to bless the structure with good fortune. It is a request for a blessing from the gods on the structure to provide good fortune and fertility," the company's e-mail said.

The task is to put stickers with your name/tag/signature or even a picture onto buildings or other static stuff around. You can send a text message to urbantakeover with your mobile phone in order to 'claim' the spot you marked. On urbantakeover's website you can see your and your team's owned territories.

The American banking giant BB&T is to make a $2 million grant to the University of Texas to establish a chair for the study of Ayn Rand's philosophical system, which is called Objectivism. Ayn Rand died in 1982, but her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead continue to be hugely popular. Rand advocated laissez-faire capitalism and strongly opposed socialism, altruism and religion. BB&T say their aim is to encourage a thorough and fair discussion of Rand's philosophy and ethics on university campuses. The bank’s critics have accused it of using its shareholders’ cash to warp debate and influence the curriculum.

This paper challenges the common assumption that democracy requires majority rule. I assume that we can adopt a contractualist approach to uncover the demands of political equality and argue that contractors would not necessarily accept majority rule to make decisions in their society. I first reject broadly consequentialist arguments, arguing that firstly no procedure guarantees ideally best outcomes, secondly that in cases of pluralism there is no need to suppose there is a uniquely best outcome, and thirdly that we need to be fair between different individuals. I develop this need for fairness into a case for weighted lotteries, drawing on the Taurek-Scanlon 'saving the greater number' debate. This leads to my conclusion that democratic ideals can be realized by selecting a random vote to determine the outcomes of decisions.

In accordance with the 25 year plan which has guided all internet development in the Soviet Union since 1987, our proud nation has finally been granted a .su domain name. We only wish that the rest of the Union could have held together long enough to see how proud we are!

The corrupt, monarchistic, and anti-populist Russian Government offered to sell our nation the domain name years ago, but "not before the plan dictates" we told them. As progress marches tirelessly forward, next week we will upgrade our modulator-demodulator device "Red Awn" to support "dial tones". We anticipate downtime.

Come look at our new URL, http://unterzoegersdorf.su, in all its bittersweet glory.

(Celebration: The Young Brigades of the CPSUZöD constructed a Czarist monument -- and burnt it!)

South Africa will host the World Cup in 2010 so construction – and corruption – is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity. These inequalities could be a major issue in the 2009 presidential election.

Why waste good money on a fiendishly expensive glass mirror for a huge telescope, when you can have a cheaper, flawless mirror simply by spinning a pool of mercury?