Bits & Pieces

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture turns its attention to the earthquake in Chile with its usual stunning results. The pictures are amazing.

I am currently reading From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, by Sean Carroll. It is a fascinating book about the nature of time in light of our current understanding of the cosmos and its history.  Try to come up with your definition of time and then take a look at the talk below. Carroll has thought a lot about time, and explains very complicated ideas in a straight-forward way.

Part 2 is available here.

To me, the death of a trainer at SeaWorld by the acts of a captive killer whale highlight the problem with using animals purely for human entertainment.  It is wrong, both morally and practically, to imprison a animal meant to cruise the seas in a cement tank solely to make money on displaying that animal. When the animal is a dolphin (yes, despite the name Killer Whales are dolphins) and therefore highly intelligent it is even worse. It is torture, pure and simple. And there is no sufficient justification for such abuse.

Susan Orlean agrees:

I hate to say this, but I loved seeing Shamu perform at SeaWorld last Christmas. Seeing an orca rise up out of a pool in balletic rhythm with a trainer, feeling the seismic thuds as he hit the water, and watching him power his way through the water was stirring and astonishing. Afterward I felt awful. There is probably some valuable research that goes on at water parks, and perhaps audiences who come away as stirred and astonished as I was will be inspired to join a whale group or take up an environmental cause. But none of that balances out the bigger issue, which is that whales don’t belong in captivity, and certainly not in amusement parks.

Further, the practice of training killer whales for pure entertainment is also dangerous for the trainers. Read this chapter from The Peforming Orca: Why the Show Must Stop, part of the background material for a program on PBS called A Whale of a Business. Excerpt:

Since the first orcas were kept captive in the 1960s, there have been numerous “accidents” with trainers, most of which were covered up. Those that have come to light were mostly revealed by disenchanted trainers or members of the public who witnessed the accidents during a show. Marine park public affairs directors always played down such incidents, calling them bizarre accidents, and in some cases denied they had occurred. In recent years, with the proliferation of cheap video cameras, a number of incidents have been recorded. They range from bitings and collisions to near drownings when whales have held trainers underwater. Many of these dangerous incidents happened when the trainers were riding whales around the pool. Some former trainers such as Graeme Ellis believe that orcas, in general, do not like to be ridden. “They may tolerate it when they’re young or new to captivity,” says Ellis, “but later, it can lead to problems.” Yet most marine parks still feature trainers riding orcas during the shows. Only Sealand and the Vancouver Public Aquarium in Canada, Miami Seaquarium in the USA, Marineland in France and Taiji in Japan no longer allow trainers to ride the whales. In recent years, fewer trainer accidents are known to have occurred at these establishments compared to parks that feature in-the-water work. Yet, there have been some injuries and the most serious incident of all occurred at Sealand.

Update: Alexander Cockburn writes that using Orcas for entertainment purposes is a form of slavery.

Call him, just for now, Spartacus. He was two years when the slavers captured him in 1982 and hauled him off to the little town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the far Canadian west. And there he met his fellow slaves, Nootka and Haida. Day after day in slave school they learned their tricks. Day after day, they did their act for the paying customers. And then, on February 20, 1991, in the tank operated by Sealand of the Pacific, the three struck back at their captors.

Okay, not Spartacus, but an orca whale – Tillikum, the one who drowned 40-year old Dawn Brancheau this week in the Shamu tank at SeaWorld, Orlando, after grabbing her by her pony-tail.

Tillikum was caught off Iceland. Nootka and Haida, both female, were seized in the Pacific. In fact Nootka was the third orca by that name to be bought by Sealand. The first two died within a year of their capture. At that time enslaved orcas had a life expectancy in captivity of anywhere from one to four years. These days they do a bit better. In wild waters, orcas live to be anywhere from 30 to 60.

I love looking at fractals. The core characteristic of these calculations is that as you calculate (or zoom into a visual representation of the calculations) you see similar structures no matter how far you go. The video below shows just how extreme this can be.

Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD from teamfresh on Vimeo.

If you are interested in a fuller explanation, below is part 1 of an explanation by Arthur C. Clark.

Amazing video showing the full known universe, to scale. Click through the video to see it full size in HD.

I bet you can guess. According to Business Week, Citicorp and Goldman Sachs have both received early batches of the vaccine. This while high risk individuals are still waiting in many places. How many pregnant investment bankers have you run into lately?

More from the Huffington Post:

In particular, NBC reports that Goldman Sachs has received 200 doses of the vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Wall Street banks, like many other companies, put in requests for the vaccine but seem to have had something of a leg up on securing doses.

I keep hearing more and more seemingly rationale people announce that neither they nor their children are going to be vaccinated. They will not be vaccinated against swine flu, nor will they take any other vaccinations.

If this were simple craziness, it would be fine. But the fact of the matter is that those who refuse vaccinations hurt not only themselves, but all of us.

Amy Wallace, writing in this month’s issue of Wired, outlines the damage done by vaccine deniers. It is a fascinating article and well worth a full read. Excerpt:

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

The Obama administration has announced that Federal prosecutors will no longer go after medical marijuana users or distributors. Finally, some action to reflect the will of the voters.

People who use marijuana for medical purposes and those who distribute it should not face federal prosecution, provided they act according to state law, the Justice Department said on Monday in a directive with far-reaching political and legal implications.

Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles is looking to begin a big crackdown on distributors.

Update: And yesterday, a judge ruled that the City of Los Angeles could not impose a moratorium on new marijuana shops. And here is the full-text of the DOJ Memorandum.

I love this. They Might Be Giants is out with a CD/DVD set for kids, which teaches them that science is real and different from stories like fairy tales. It is called Here Comes Science.  Below is one song from the release.

And it is available at Amazon.

From Standish, Michigan (see the previous post) to Los Angeles. I have lived in Northern Michigan and also in LA. The Station Fire in Los Angeles is amazing and far larger and closer to heavily populated areas than any I saw when I lived there.  Amazing pictures of the blaze are available, as usual, from The Big Picture. Thank God, Los Angeles wasn’t facing El Nino winds at the same time.

Here is an amazing time-lapse video from a fire station in Los Angeles showing the extent and closeness of the raging fire there. As a former resident of LA, I can understand the fear there right now.

This is amazing. Click the video while playing to watch a larger view and try it in HD as well. Credits here.

What are involuntary parks? They are areas that for disturbing reasons are left alone to return to a state of nature. Parts of Detroit are involuntary parks (and Detroit makes this small listing so click on the bonus information at the end). Here is a startling collection of six major involuntary parks, starting with the Korean DMZ. (via Bruce Sterling)

photo credit: US Army Korea – IMCOM

Check out this picture taken from space showing the shadow from the recent eclipse. Amazing.

So says Henry Markram, who is leading the Blue Brain Project.  He spoke this week at the latest TED Conference.

Markram, for the first time, shares how he is addressing one theory of how the brain works. The theory is that the brain “builds” a version of the universe and projects this version, like a bubble, all around us. But Markram says we can directly address this philosophical question with science. Anesthetics don’t work by blocking receptors. They introduce a noise into the brain to confuse the neurons to prevent you from making “decisions.” You must make decisions to perceive anything. 99% of what you see in a room is not what comes in through the eyes — it’s what you infer about that room.

If this actually can be achieved, it will be possible to research brain behavior on an artificial construct and the breakthroughs could be huge.