The last time someone as paranoid and vindictive as Stephen Harper was thwarted...

The one entity, one independent power that has stymied Stephen Harper again and again, contradicted his agenda, limited his options and overturned his decisions MULTIPLE TIMES in just the last few months has been the Supreme Court of Canada.

Does Stephen Harper strike anyone as someone who responds well to independent oversight or any restrictions on the exercise of his power?  Can we really count on Harper placidly accepting such an infuriating limitation on his exercise of power - clearly his number one constant priority?

There is a precedent, for a similar powerful, suspicious, paranoid and dictatorial leader being challenged by the judicial branch and lashing out violently in defiance of constitutional norms.  Should Canadians be watchful for our own high court equivalent of the Saturday Night Massacre?

Taking Count

Just to expand on a reply I gave to a post of at Dawg's place on the subject:

The surface reason among the right in both the US and Canada for opposing the census is crazy, the subsurface one is evil.

The surface stuff is all Glenn Beck paranoia about the evil alien entity 'the government' trying to pry into people's lives so it can pollute their precious bodily fluids. The subsurface reason that the hard headed backroom right wingers who never let ideology or conspiracy theory get in the way of the power impulse worry about, is about keeping a proper count of the population from being done to try to remove the pressure to spend money and attention on communities that aren't part of the right wing coalition.

Spending money on the poor and the non-white is what they're in power to stop. Hard numbers that prove the need of these communities make it harder to neglect them.

There is a direct linkage between detailed counts with detailed questions and representation and spending in and by our government. Think about how precarious a hold the Conservatives have on power and think about why they would oppose a detailed count of Canadians that might result in pressure for boundary changes, reapportioning of electoral seats and increased spending in places they'd rather pretend don't exist at all.

More human than human

So the next time some sub-literate blowhard starts dribbling to you about racial purity, white superiority and the evils of race mixing, you might want to mention to him that it turns out that the only pure members of the species homo sapiens sapiens on Earth are Africans.

Early humans mated with Neanderthals, and modern human DNA was changed forever by it. New genetic evidence, announced today, proves that most humans share 1-4% of their DNA with Neanderthals. Unless you're from Africa, in which case you're Neanderthal-free. A massive, multiyear study at the Max Planck Institute compared the genomes of three Neanderthal women (reconstructed from 38,000-year-old bones) with five humans from across the world - two from Africa, one from Europe, one from China, and one from Papua, New Guinea. The results show that humans and Neanderthals did interbreed, possibly as early as 100 thousand years ago when early humans were immigrating out of Africa into Europe and Asia. This immigration pattern also helps to explain why the two human genomes from Africa have no traces of Neanderthal in them. The African population never interbred with our hominid cousins.

All those Star Trek episodes that assume that we'll cheerfully start breeding with aliens as soon as we meet them might not have been too off the mark. We've already shacked up with the only other species we ever met.

Of Tentacles and Tools

African or European Swallows Octopuses?

Lots of people who know my interests are sending me this amazing video of an octopus who carries a coconut shell around with him in case he ever needs a quick portable hiding place:



I've devoted a fair amount of space here in the past to the confounding intelligence of the octopus. They should not be as intelligent as they are. They're invertebrates, a genus that by and large can't generate enough brain power to float a soap bubble. They're isolationists. Antisocial loners that don't hang out with other octopuses and regard every other species as edible or something that thinks they are edible. Every other creature known for high intelligence develops and uses it by being very social.

Octopuses largely nurture their unusual braininess in splendid isolation hiding in rocky underwater crevices poking one suspicious, bulbous eyeball out only when hungry.

And yet the only limit on the potential intelligence of the Octopus appears to be a very limited life-span. How smart could an octopus get if it could live longer than five years?

Mourning Cycles

In Shia Islam a traditional mourning cycle of the 3rd, 7th and 40th day after a death is the pattern behind the latest surge of protest in Iran, as martyrs to freedom like Neda are remembered in the streets. In 1978 and 1979 similar escalating mourning cycles produced escalating protests which led to crackdowns and deaths causing more cycles of martyrdom.

The cycle became a multiplying fractal effect ultimately contributing to the fall of the Shah.

The hidden shipyards of the Colombian jungles

In just the last two years submarines have become the source of over a third of the cocaine entering the United States.

MEXICO CITY -- When anti-narcotics agents first heard that drug cartels were building an armada of submarines to transport cocaine, they thought it was a joke.

Now U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles.

An experimental oddity just two years ago, these strange semi-submarines are the cutting edge of drug trafficking today. They ferry hundreds of tons of cocaine for powerful Mexican cartels that are taking over the Pacific Ocean route for most northbound shipments, according to the Colombian navy.

The sub-builders are even trying to develop a remote-controlled model, officials say.

"That means no crew. That means just cocaine, or whatever, inside the boat," said Michael Braun, a former chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The subs are powered by ordinary diesel engines and built of simple fiberglass in clandestine shipyards in the Colombian jungle. U.S. officials expect 70 or more to be launched this year with a potential cargo capacity of 380 tons of cocaine, worth billions of dollars in the United States.

"You seem to be trying to write an angry rant, can I help?"

You're familiar with spell check and grammar check, are you ready for word processors with an emotional content check?

These "sentiment analysis" tools are a branch of a wider area of computer science that is trying to teach computers to understand the feelings expressed in text just as well as humans do, and the commercial applications of such technology are already starting to be realised.

The early adopters of these tools are the owners of big brand names in a world where company reputations are affected by customer blogs as much as advertising campaigns. A small but growing group of firms is developing tools that can trawl blogs and online comments, gauging the emotional responses brought about by the company or its products.

This reminds me of the cellphone apps that you can program to not let you call your ex when you're drunk.

Just because he was right doesn't mean he was, you know, RIGHT

ROME (Reuters) - Earthquakes like the one that killed more than 200 people in Italy this week are still impossible to predict, and a local scientist's claims to have done so should be treated with caution, geophysicists say.
Gioacchino Giuliani is at the center of a debate about the limits of seismology after Italian officials shrugged off his warnings last month that a devastating earthquake in the central Abruzzo region was imminent.
In fact Giuliani, who works at the National Institute of Physics, was even reported to police for spreading panic.
While many Italians are now more than ready to listen to whatever Giuliani has to say, geophysicists in Europe and the United States remain skeptical of his claims to have discovered an effective early-warning system.

Mr Garrison would love it

A solution to the world's urban transportation problems could lie in two wheels not four, according to executives for General Motors and Segway.
The companies announced on Tuesday that they are working together to develop a two-wheeled, two-seat electric vehicle designed to be a fast, safe, inexpensive and clean alternative to traditional cars and trucks for cities across the world.
The Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility, or PUMA, project also would involve a vast communications network that would allow vehicles to interact with each other, regulate the flow of traffic and prevent crashes from happening.

All kidding aside, I live in the downtown core of my city, I would actually get one of these.

The RCMP VS Insite

Just a little reality check clarification: The scandal isn't that the RCMP paid for research, it's that they paid for a specific conclusion.

VANCOUVER — Newly released e-mails show the RCMP tried to discredit Vancouver's supervised-injection clinic and are part of a pattern of interference in science by the federal government, a renowned AIDS researcher says.

“Now we have documentation of what we sort of knew,” said Julio Montaner, the director of B.C.'s Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, referring to RCMP e-mails released this week by Vancouver's Pivot Legal Society.

One refers to the “Centre for Excrements” and another, in relation to an RCMP-commissioned report on Insite, notes that “as per our request, the report has no reference to the RCMP.”

That 2007 report by Colin Mangham concluded that Insite-related research was skewed and that the clinic was having little or no effect on drug-overdose deaths or public disorder.

Detractors have slammed Dr. Mangham's report as an opinion piece and noted his role as director with the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, which takes a hard line against use of illegal drugs.

Research: The Octopus God

Octopuses are smarter than they should be. Every other invertebrate registers as static on an EEG. An Octopus generates the kind of slow looping patterns you'd see in a dog or maybe even a primate.

Na Kika- The octopus-god of the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati). His many arms served him well when he shoved up the earth from the bottom of the sea to form the islands, the beaches and the rocks. He is the son of Na Atibu and Nei Teuke, the first beings.

Octopuses are among the very few of their charges that Aquarium staff will give names to. They know them as escape artists: A tank that was full of fish yesterday is empty this morning and there's a wet trail from a sealed octopus tank across the room and back again. And a much fatter very self satisfied octopus. In zoos the escape artists are orangutans another of nature's anti-social loners.

The Hawaiʻian creation myth relates that the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.

Octopuses have a unique flexible brain wrapped around their esophagus. It has complicated whorls and ridges and a very complex visual cortex. It needs to be; Octopuses apparently coordinate the movements of their two legs and six arms by sight.

Kanaloa - The Hawaiian Creator, the equivalent of Tangaroa from Maori myths. He is also the god of the underworld, who can teach magic. He appears in the shape of an octopus.

They learn. They remember things. They make plans. They play.

The Samoan demigod Tae-o-Tagaloa is born of a woman part human and part fe'e ("octopus"), hence he is part god and part human.[13] Magic connected with the number eight throughout southern Polynesia may derive from the eight-armed octopus. The Maui figure, sometimes represented as a son of the Tagaroa family, is "eight-headed" in Tahiti, "eighth born" in Samoa.[14] In the Marquesas, according to Handy, "an octopus, or if one could not be obtained, a taro root with eight rootlets was used ceremonially in certain rites."

The tragedy of the octopus is that it has enormous potential brain power and no time to develop it. A long lived Octopus lasts at most five or six years. They breed once and then whither up and die.

But what if that process could be stopped, the biological kill switch blocked?

That is not dead which can eternal lie.

And with strange æons even death may die

-The Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred

UPDATE: I sourced the passage that in the Hawai'ian creation myth 'the present cosmos is only the last of a series, having arisen in stages from the wreck of the previous universe. In this account, the octopus is the lone survivor of the previous, alien universe.'

It's from Oceanic Mythology by Roland B. Dixon published in 1916. Dixon appears to have been an odd egg, 'Even though Dixon was looked upon by fellow anthropologists as a very knowledgeable man, he was looked up to by very few because of his impersonal nature. Alfred Tozzer, one of his Harvard colleagues, spoke of Dixon: “he was rigid and unbending in his ideas and he shrank from personal contacts”' Very much in the classic Lovecraftian model of the aesthetically sensitive, vaguely hysterical, obsessed academic investigator. A life-long New Englander of course.

Here's the relevant passage:

One of the most curious and interesting of Polynesian cosmogonic myths is that found in Hawaii, which, although differing in several important particulars from those just outlined, must yet be considered as belonging to the same general type. In the very beginning, however, a striking variation occurs, in that although we have the source of all things from chaos, it is a chaos which is simply the wreck and ruin of an earlier world. "And so, creation begins in the origin of a new world from the shadowy reflex of one that is past. . . .

"Unsteadily, as in dim moon-shimmer,
From out Makalii's night-dark veil of cloud
Thrills, shadow-like, the prefiguration of the world to be."

The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages, and in the very first of these life springs from the shadowy abyss and dark night. There is here, however, no long series of antecedent, vaguely personified entities ranged in genealogical sequence, but the immediate appearance of living things. At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea--at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.

Octo-Dancing from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.