Scalia Discovered with Pillow Over His Head
February 15th, 2016Via: MySanAntonio:
When Poindexter tried to awaken Scalia about 8:30 the next morning, the judge’s door was locked and he did not answer. Three hours later, Poindexter returned after an outing, with a friend of Scalia who had come from Washington with him.
“We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled,” said Poindexter.
How About a Trump/Sanders Ticket?
February 13th, 2016I have a Facebook account that I use, 99% of the time, for comedy gold. Sometimes, the stuff that I see in my feed is so funny that I damn near fall out of my chair.
Artist: illmagore:
Artist: grrrgraphics:
Mojoptix 001: Digital Sundial
February 13th, 2016Via: Mojoptix:
Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justice, Dies at 79
February 13th, 2016Via: CNN:
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading conservative voice on the high court, has died at the age of 79, a government source and a family friend told CNN on Saturday.
Scalia died in his sleep during a visit to Texas.
A government official said Scalia went to bed Friday night and told friends he wasn’t feeling well. Saturday morning, he didn’t get up for breakfast. And the group he was with for a hunting trip left without him.
Someone at the ranch went in to check on him and found him unresponsive.
…
Scalia’s death in an election year sets up a titanic confirmation tussle over his successor on the bench. The already challenging task of getting a Democratic president’s nominee through a Republican-controlled Senate will made even more difficult as the fight over Scalia’s replacement will emerge as a dominant theme of an already wild presidential election.
Soon after news of Scalia’s death surfaced, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for the vacancy to be filled after Obama’s presidency ends.
“The American people? should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” McConnell said in a statement.
But McConnell’s Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, called for the seat to be filled “right away.”
Scientist Runs Piracy Hub for Science Journal Articles—Almost All Science Journal Articles
February 13th, 2016Via: BigThink:
On the evening of November 9th, 1989, the Cold War came to a dramatic end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Four years ago another wall began to crumble, a wall that arguably has as much impact on the world as the wall that divided East and West Germany. The wall in question is the network of paywalls that cuts off tens of thousands of students and researchers around the world, at institutions that can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, from accessing scientific research.
On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone.
Russia Warns Saudis: Deploying Ground Troops in Syria Would Unleash ‘A New World War’
February 13th, 2016Via: National Post:
Gaziantep, Turkey — Russia on Thursday night warned of “a new world war” in Syria after Persian Gulf states threatened to send in ground forces to the conflict.
Foreign and defence ministers of the leading nations backing different factions in Syria met in Munich and Brussels Thursday following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks.
Both Russia and the United States demanded ceasefires in the civil war so the fight could be concentrated against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but each nation on its own, conflicting, terms.
The Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, staged their own intervention, saying they were committed to sending in ground troops. Their favoured rebel groups have been badly hit by Russian air raids and driven back by Iranian-supplied pro-regime troops. They said their declared target was Isil.
But the presence of troops from Gulf states which have funded the Syrian rebels would be taken as a hostile act by the Assad regime and its backers, and a sign that they were staking their claim to a say in the final settlement.
Russia issued a stark warning of the potential consequences.
“The Americans and our Arab partners must think well: Do they want a permanent war?” Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper. “It would be impossible to win such a war quickly, especially in the Arab world, where everybody is fighting against everybody.
“All sides must be compelled to sit at the negotiating table instead of unleashing a new world war.”
Doctors Think Microcephaly Caused by Pesticide Pyriproxyfen, Not Zika Virus
February 13th, 2016Via: Ecologist:
With the proposed connection between the Zika virus and Brazil’s outbreak of microcephaly in new born babies looking increasingly tenuous, Latin American doctors are proposing another possible cause: Pyriproxyfen, a pesticide used in Brazil since 2014 to arrest the development of mosquito larvae in drinking water tanks. Might the ‘cure’ in fact be the poison?
…
Argentine doctors: it’s the insecticide
Now a new report has been published by the Argentine doctors’ organisation, Physicians in the Crop-Sprayed Towns (PCST), [1] which not only challenges the theory that the Zika virus epidemic in Brazil is the cause of the increase in microcephaly among newborns, but proposes an alternative explanation.
According to PCST, the Ministry failed to recognise that in the area where most sick people live, a chemical larvicide that produces malformations in mosquitoes was introduced into the drinking water supply in 2014.
This pesticide, Pyriproxyfen, is used in a state-controlled programme aimed at eradicating disease-carrying mosquitos. The Physicians added that the Pyriproxyfen is manufactured by Sumitomo Chemical, a Japanese ‘strategic partner’ of Monsanto. – a company they have learned to distrust due to the vast volume of the company’s pesticides sprayed onto Argentina’s cropland.
Pyriproxyfen is a growth inhibitor of mosquito larvae, which alters the development process from larva to pupa to adult, thus generating malformations in developing mosquitoes and killing or disabling them. It acts as an insect juvenile hormone or juvenoid, and has the effect of inhibiting the development of adult insect characteristics (for example, wings and mature external genitalia) and reproductive development.
The chemical has a relatively low risk profile as shown by its WHO listing, with low acute toxicity. Tests carried out in a variety of animals by Sumitomo found that it was not a teratogen (did not cause birth defects) in the mammals it was tested on. However this cannot be taken as a completely reliable indicator of its effects in humans – especially in the face of opposing evidence.
The PCST commented: “Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added Pyriproxyfen to drinking water are not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on the Zika virus for this damage.”
Austrians Need Constitutional Right to Pay in Cash, Says Deputy Economy Minister
February 12th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Austrians should have the constitutional right to use cash to protect their privacy, Deputy Economy Minister Harald Mahrer said, as the European Union considers curbing the use of banknotes and coins.
“We don’t want someone to be able to track digitally what we buy, eat and drink, what books we read and what movies we watch,” Mahrer said on Austrian public radio station Oe1. “We will fight everywhere against rules” including caps on cash purchases, he said.
Gravitational Waves Detected
February 11th, 2016Via: Guardian:
Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.
“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.
The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laser beam and mirror.
The phenomenon was detected by the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.
GOLD UP NEARLY 5%
February 11th, 2016Gold Apr 16 (GCJ16.CMX) -COMEX
1,253.90 Up 59.30(4.96%) 11:31AM EST
Ye ha!
Via: Bloomberg:
Gold climbed to the highest in a year as investors sought a haven from tumbling stock markets after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen suggested the central bank may delay raising interest rates.
