The Sun : A Bright Spot

The sky will fall on December 21, 2012. Or maybe the 22nd.

There are sites that sorta explain it. One site quotes a real NASA report that states:

Many forecasters believe Solar Cycle 24 will be big and intense. Peaking in 2011 or 2012, the cycle to come could have significant impacts on telecommunications, air traffic, power grids and GPS systems. (And don't forget the Northern Lights!) In this age of satellites and cell phones, the next solar cycle could make itself felt as never before."

The rather alarming headline on the non-NASA site:
NASA Announces 2012 Destruction Probable

Dude! Ahhhhh!!! Run!!!

NASA made no such announcement.
What NASA said is that solar activity, which according to predictable cyclic movements is due to peak in 2011 or 2012, may have a significant impact on modern electronic communications. Losing your Wi-Fi sucks. It is not, however, the end of the world.

The author interprets "2011 or 2012" thusly:

I find it quite a coincidence that this major happening is forecasted (sic) for 2012, as this exact timing correlates to the ancient Mayan prediction of the end of the dimension.

Pardon my English, but "2011 or 2012 " is not an "exact time" at all- it's a vague range of dates. And what does "end of the dimension" mean anyway?


The site will also sell you mp3 files that will give you "Psychic Powers" if you download them-for a fee...I see a rip-off in the future.
That's the bad news.
The good news?
There isn't much future left.
The future, as everyone who isn't me knows, is scheduled to end on or around 12/22/2012.


See, there are some Cosmic Alignments taking place in 2012.

- There will be a Transit of Venus across the Sun, an event so rare that it hasn't happened since 2004.

- There will be, as noted above, an usually active period of solar magnetism; a Solar Maximum, as described by NASA. This hasn't happened since 1958.
We might see awesome Northern Lights and experience really crappy cell-phone coverage.
My advice: Stock up on ammunition, barbed-wire and books.

- According to experts, there will be a Galactic Alignment - the winter solstice Sun will align with the Milky Way's equator or something...NASA is trying keep this information under wraps, which sort of proves that it's gonna happen...the Government Eggheads don't want us to know, but it's too late...the secret is out.
According to expert interpretation of ancient Mayan astronomy, the Alignment will occur on Dec. 21st (or the 22nd), 2012- the final day of the Mayan Calender, give or take thirty-six years.

-My Car Talk desk calender ends on 12/31/2008. This is pretty close to 12/22/2102.
Nine days and four years, to be precise.
Nine plus four equals thirteen.
According to experts, 13 is a magickal number.
Quite a coincidence, eh?

- This Alignment will place us in the path of a Comet/Planet named Nimburu. NASA recently sent an unmanned probe (code name Deep Impact) to a comet's surface - allegedly for the sake of so-called "scientific research". The real mission was to test the feasibility of planting a nuclear 'bunker buster' bomb under the comet's surface...if successful, this technology will be used in a vain attempt to prevent NIMBURU from smashing into the Earth and turning us all into fossil fuel, just like it did to the dinosaurs.

-Some experts claim that the World is gonna End. This might be true if your life depends on GPS technology...winter of 2012 will be a bad time to be lost in the woods. Even a traditional compass might not work, the earth's magnetic field might be all fuckity...you could try to get your bearings from the stars, but the Earth might be shifted on it's axis, so even if you know how to navigate old school, the stars won't be where they should be...or they'll be obscured by a fiery, toxic, earth-encompassing cloud of post-collision soot and debris.
My advice: Choose your 2012 winter vacation site wisely. Deep underground or off-planet is best.

The 'glass half-empty' crowd can concern itself with the short-term inconveniences produced by a comet-induced global extinction, but I think it's better to be optimistic about such things- every life-smothering cloud of inter-planetary dust has a silver lining if you look hard enough.

To an oil-dependent optimist, the idea of a Earth/comet collision is good news, because oil is actually a renewable resource. Fossil fuels are called "fossil" because they are composed of old, dead things. In the 'big picture', oil is the ultimate Biofuel- it can be made from just about everyone, given enough patience and sacrifice.

Sure, it will be difficult on us , our kids and their grand-kids, but ten million generations from now our descendants will once again have cheap, plentiful gasoline.
They will enjoy this ample supply for roughly one hundred years; after which a comet once again hits Earth, everyone dies and the 250 million-year cycle begins anew, give or take a few years.

Let's take the far-thinking approach.
The driver of today is the gasoline of tomorrow.
Together we can be the future.

Look to the stars.
See ya in the tank.

Answered!

Do possums attack people?

According to Google , there are 87,400 answers to this question and answers #1 and #2 are both provided by this blog.
My site meter tells me that, on average, three people per day visit this site asking : do possums attack people?

The answer is : No.

Unless they have rabies.
Or are cornered. Or hungry.
Or mutants.

Why are they asking this question anyway? It's the sort of question most people would only ask when confronted with a snarling possum; by which time it's usually too late to cry for help, much less go on-line and Google "do possums attack people?"

I mean, have you ever seen a possum snarl? Of course not. No one living has.

According to one expert , human encounters with possums lead to over 2 million fatal attacks per year. These attacks are almost invariably fatal only to the possum.

In one of his lesser-known experiments, Nik Tesla discovered that possums possess an acute sensitivity to minute changes in the Earth's magnetic field, such as those produced by solar flares on our own sun.

Shortly before he vanished while demonstrating a prototype 'time weapon' to the U.S. military, Tesla established a link between increased solar activity and unusual possum behavior. He observed that during periods of flare-ups, the possums outside his squalid New York boarding house would engage in otherwise unheard of behavior, such as devouring automobile tires and holding strange marsupial orgies involving ceremonial headgear and human sacrifice. He speculated that possums could be exposed to a combination of solar radiation and negative energy and transformed into 'electro' warrior-animals designed to act as advance troops in the obsolete art of trench warfare.



This idea was rejected by officials from the U.S.A., England and the Soviet Union, who were more interested in developing tanks, planes and artillery. Tesla's research into weaponized possums was lost when he vanished nearly two years later.

So, no. Possums don't attack people. But they very well could have.

Get In Now!

I posted this link in one of my first-ever posts. At the time, I had a temp job that was so slack I had nothing better to do than spend entire days researching weird animals.
One of my enduring favorites is the hagfish, which is a really fascinating creature.
Did you know that the hagfish can tie itself into knots and cover itself with slime? It can.
Anyway, I had a brief period of hagfish-driven wistfulness, eventually moving on to the snakehead fish, the giant squid and other beasties ...but I kept drifting back to the hagfish and wondering...

NOW

Now you can make $30k-$50k a month, in your spare time, raising hagfish. I started with a motley collection of wading pools that I stole from suburban backyards and just this month I signed a 10-year contract with The City to convert their soon-to-be unfunded Municipal Swimming Pools into a series of hagfish hatcheries. I can barely find the time to write this, hurried as I am by meetings with my perpetually breathless team of expert helpers-even now we are lining up some other Big Cities and boy, let me tell you, they are ponying up some juicy incentives to help us annex their burdensome and unsanitary Public pools.

I can't tell you the details, since it's mostly illegal, but trust me-it's a sweetheart deal!

Big cities, not dead-end towns, but Big Cities- the kind you read about in the papers- are jumping on the Hagfish bandwagon faster than slimed lightning.

You can do more than read about the Big City hagfish goldmines- you can own one of them!

NOW IS THE TIME

The hagfish stands poised to break out of the muck and into the Fortune 500. The hagfish is a critical player in the booming North Korean marketplace and now you can bring a little of that Asian zest to your hometown.

The Koreans have been eating hagfish for centuries- more so now than ever, since the 'hag's' food of choice is dead fish, which Korea's polluted waterways produce in abundance. The hagfish thrives in an environment of untreated sewage and raw industrial waste, lending credibility and hope to the once far-fetched Utopian ideal of the world's oceans becoming a global hagfish paradise.

In N.K. there's not much to eat but hagfish and sewer cabbages, meaning that North Korea is actually thirty to forty years ahead of the rest of the planet, not fifty years behind , as some speculate.

WHY ?

Face it-the meat market has seen better days. First there was the Mad Cow scare; now an Avian Flu pandemic seems inevitable- I mean, migratory birds as carriers? That's frightening. The possibility of a world-wide decimation of poultry livestocks is a very real one, and it could cause an epic shitstorm in the Big Food markets.

Of course any domestic outbreaks would be covered up at first- or blamed on Canada, or both - but eventually it'll get out and then-no more chicken or turkey, goose or duck, pigeon or vulture, etc. No more eggs.

No more omelets or holiday bird feasting. What a fallen world it will be for the wretched masses who aren't ready to seize the future. The ones who didn't invest in hagfish when they had they chance. I'd pity them, but I'm too busy counting my money. When the chicken disappear, they're gonna leave behind a mighty big hole. I intend to plug that hole with hagfish.

HAGFISH IS THE NEW CHICKEN

Like me, if you've ever worked the 'C' shift at a frankfurter factory , you know that anything can be converted into a product that the majority of people will treat as if it were edible. This includes hagfish. Modern food processing technologies allow the entire fish, rudimentary skeleton included, to be pulped, pasted and formed into a variety of consumer-friendly shapes- why just last week, I signed a deal with Disney Inc. to manufacture a series of hagfish nuggets in the shapes of beloved Disney characters!

Q: What looks like Donald Duck, tastes like chicken franks and flies off of supermarket shelves?

A: Hagfish Nuggets!

As a bonus, hag's hide can be fashioned into small, versatile articles such as those that would normally be constructed of leather- a belt, a wallet, or a pouch that a child could use to carry marbles and a pitiful handful of coins collected from passers-by. These items can be cheaply manufactured overseas by unpaid orphans, stamped with a look-alike designer logo and sold on cable TV and parking-lot "flee" markets for a ten-fold profit.

Even better, the copious slime that the fish produces when stressed contains the same proteins as egg albumen, making it a perfect substitute for eggs in many dishes, especially baked goods. Remember, after the chicken is gone, so is the egg.

THIS EVOLUTIONARY THROWBACK IS A MONEY TREE!

I've even taken the financially prudent step of registering "Hulafish" as a business trademark- 'Hagfish' as a brand name has fared poorly in our focus groups, but everyone one loves the old-fashioned, yet hip sound of 'Hulafish'- it's similar phonetically to tunafish, which gives the consumer a "comfort platform" from which to encounter my product. Your product.

Our product.

I NEED YOUR HELP

That's a lie. I need your money.

A mere $50,000 will grant you semi-exclusive Hulafish farming rights in one or more specially selected zip codes. Some of our carefully selected regions are so desolate and inaccessible that they are virtually uninhabited, making them prime areas for intensive development- you can recoup your initial investment with just one mass spamming, selling sub-farms and franchising sweatshops for the production of "Hulaskin" shoes.

My friend, if you can't sell a product named "Hulaskin" on the Web, you should be living in a Marxist collective, not investing in my product.

URGENT

Unless I can get $50k soon, the City will withdraw it's offer- and the hagfish will never save the world. Instead of millions of dollars in subsidized profits , myself and my fellow visionaries will have only our broken dreams and the pained expression on our faces as we once again tell our teary-eyed and malnourished children that this Friday, as every Friday before, there will be no Hulafish on our barren plank of a table.

Don't let this happen.

Send money NOW, before it's too late.

For the children.

Show Me!

For decades I have been hearing this claim: " men think about sex more often than women". Sometimes this is quantified , such as : "men think about sex every 52 seconds opposed to every 96 seconds for women" etc...

To me, this is an absurd thing to claim as fact. How do you measure thoughts? I once challenged a friend who claimed men had a 'sex thought' every seven seconds ( 9 for women) to show me some scientific proof.

She said: " but everyone knows it."

They do? I don't.

"I read it somewhere."

Where? I've looked a lot.

"It's a well-known fact."

If it's so "well-known" why won't any credible sources lend their backing to it?

I recently had a fave penpal make the same claim in general terms...and here it is again in yet another permutation (every 30 seconds for men) in my previous post's comments...aarrrgh!

Everyone knows it, but no one knows how they know it.

I have never read of a conclusive, scientifically valid experiment that can objectively measure the frequency and occurrence of specific thoughts.

A simple survey will not work- merely asking "how often do you think about water?" skews the results because it immediately forces the subject to think of water.

Asking people to honestly and objectively measure and report their own thoughts about sex is pure folly; people lie about sex and it's damned near impossible to be objective on the subject of self.

If someone thinks of water, are they thinking of rain? Thirst? A car wash? What is a water thought?
What constitutes thinking about sex? This crucial element is undefined in the "common wisdom".

Note that for this exercise, it doesn't matter which gender thinks about sex more often- ( my guess is that it's roughly equal-with many, many variables)- the only thing that matters is the methodology used in the experiment that proves or disproves the statement.

How would you set out to measure how often a human thinks about sex?

My first idea would be to measure the electrical brain activity in humans in a sexually dormant state and compare it to measurements taken from sexually aroused subjects.

(Sexual arousal can be measured- if you don't know how, you are too young to be reading this)

Activity present in Group A brains (horny) but not in B brains ( unhorny) might offer some insight as to what regions of the mind control sexual impulses, but to prove that , you'd need a numerically significant control group- subjects who through accident or design were missing that specific area of their brain- and only that portion- if they had damage or modification to any other cerebral regions, they would be unsuitable test subjects.

(If such a control group ever existed, it was probably in Germany circa 1940.)

Then you would have to prove that disabling that specific mind-region inevitably, absolutely led to the cessation of all sexual 'thoughts'; but again, you are stuck with trying to devise a way to measure thoughts- not generalized brain activity , but specific thoughts...how?

Measuring brain activity does not equate measuring 'sexual thoughts'- in any case , who would be thinking about sex while they were having their brain scanned?

So how was this fabled "study" conducted?


Vulcan mind-meld?

A friend suggested experimenting on animals, but animals don't think about sex, it's entirely run by instinct and hormonal cycles.

I did find a blogger who had attempted to answer the question of who had proved this "common knowledge" and how they proved it. This blogger put a lot of time into it and came up empty:

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

From Language Log: (w/ comments and emphasis by me)

Well, I wasn't going to blog this, because it's got nothing directly to do with speech and language. But it does have to do with rhetoric, and with the use of authoritative-sounding assertions backed up by empty references to scientific studies, a topic that we've been featuring recently. And several readers have asked me about it, based on my earlier posts about the "emerging science of sex differences". So here goes:

On page 91 of The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine writes (emphasis added):
Males have double the brain space and processing power devoted to sex as
females. Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion
while men have a small country road, men have O'Hare Airport as a hub of
processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands
small and private planes. That probably explains why 85 percent of twenty- to
thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think
about it once a day -- or up to three or four times on their most fertile days.

This striking different in rates of sexual thoughts is also one of the bullet points on the book's jacket blurb -- but there, female sex-thought frequency is downgraded from "once a day" to "once every couple of days":

Thoughts about sex enter a woman's brain once every couple of days but enter a man's brain about once every minute .

(Women only think about sex every few days? Does ANYONE believe that?)

Whatever the exact numbers, it's an impressive-sounding difference -- scientific validation for a widespread opinion about what men and women are like. And this is interesting stuff, right at the center of social and personal life, so you're probably wondering about the details of the studies that produced these estimates.
(YES! YES! SHOW ME!)

The end-notes for the quoted segment from p. 91 yield the following references:
1. Bancroft, J. (2005). "The endocrinology of sexual arousal." J Endocrinol 186(3): 411-27

2. Laumann, E. O., A. Paik, et al. (1999). "Sexual dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and predictors." JAMA 281(6): 537-44.

3. Laumann, E. O., Nicolosi, et al. (2005). "Sexual problems among women and men aged 40-80: Prevalence and correlates identified in the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors." Int J Impot Res 17(1): 39-57.

4. Lunde, I., G.K. Larsen, et al. (1991). "Sexual desire, orgasm, and sexual fantasies: A study of 625 Danish women born in 1910, 1936 and 1958." J Sex Educ Ther, 17:62-70.

Well, if you've been reading my earlier posts on (the popular presentation of) the "emerging science of sex differences", you can guess how this is going to come out.

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

Well, if you've been reading my emails, you can also guess how this is going to come out. Not a single one of the quoted studies even approached proving anything about the frequency of sexual thoughts according to gender. Curiously,one study referenced was limited to women only.

Really, it doesn't matter. Everybody thinks about sex all the time, more or less. If an academic study was done that proved this in a quantifiable way, the authors of that study would make darned sure they got their academic props in a publicized forum.
It also combines prurience and pop psychology, perfect meme material- it would be all over the internet if it existed. Publish or perish and all that...

The point is: we accept too many "facts" without checking the sources. Iraqi WMD is a great example. Judith Miller ring a bell? It should. Check her source- his code name was 'Curveball'...we want our critical intelligence from 'Curveball?

There never was any evidence, just talk about evidence. People actually believed that an unmanned drone airplane could somehow escape what was the world's most heavily controlled airspace ( remember the no-fly zone?) , cross an entire ocean and wind up in Kansas, spewing anthrax on our wheat. (In reality, we are in more danger from tainted food imported from China than we ever faced from Iraq.)
That balsa wood attack plane was an idiotic premise, easily debunked , yet people accepted it without question.
When I pointed out the fact that it was impossible, technologically or militarily , for Iraq to attack America ( those 9/11 planes were piloted by our allies, the freedom-loving oligarchs of Saudi Arabia) nobody listened.
I was insulted and threatened and lost a few friends. A man at a stoplight wanted to know why I didn't have a Flag on my Honda...he wanted to fight me. He had accepted the "common knowledge" that you are either with us or against us. It's not black and white, but to him it was clear.

Everyone knew Saddam was involved in 9/11. They just knew because everyone did, so when it came time to invade, well hell yeah, vengeance is ours...except we were wrong. Iraq was pretty helpless in 2003, and had nothing at all to do with 9/11/01, but Saddam at least kept Iran in check.Now Iraq is no longer a nation at all and it's getting worse, not better.

"But Saddam was known to murder his own citizens", squeal the War Pigs, "if we don't kill them , he will- we must destroy the country to save it".
America has killed a lot more Iraqis than Saddam, that's for sure...although the Americans don't count civilian casualties - that was one lesson the neo-cons learned from 'Nam- civilian bodycounts are bad for morale at home. Better to ignore and suppress them.

There are no surprises in this war. Everything that has happened was easily predictable. If we, as a people and as a government, had bothered to check our facts and verify our information, we would have found no reason to invade Iraq. Would the world be a better, safer place had we stayed in America? I say yes.

After the invasion, terrorism has steadily increased, not decreased.
After 9/11, most of the world considered America as the victim. That impression is long gone, now we are perceived to be in the business of creating victims.
Fox News says the other networks don't give the good news from Iraq- but Fox doesn't report the good news either, only the other media's failure to do so. This is because there is damned little good news to report.

But everyone knows the world is better without Saddam.
"They" say so.

I say show me. Show us.
Give me the methodology of the' sex thoughts ' experiment. Who conducted it; when, where and how? Scientists publish their papers, they want people to read them. If it exists, it's not hidden. Find it.

Failing that, explain how the world-and especially the Middle East- is safer now than in 2000.
Dick Cheney just said it's better now, but he didn't say why. I want the why. Car bombs kill 30 is not a sign of progress, not after four years of occupation. Were the West Germans using car bombs in 1949, four years after we defeated Hitler? No.

Beware what "they" say , check the sources, and show me.

Consider this: If there is a conclusive way to measure specific sexual thoughts, it follows that the same method could be used to measure thoughts of any sort...one can imagine a polygraph machine that not only tells you that you are lying, but also spills the details. A Police State would thrive with this sort of technology- thoughtcrime would become reality.

Are you loyal to the State? Prove it to the telepathic guillotine.