Depression, or Toxic Lifestyle Disorder?
February 15th, 2007Imagine my shock.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The backdrop to therapeutic lifestyle change, or TLC, is an increase in depressive illness since World War II, Ilardi says. “There’s increasing evidence that we were never designed for our sedentary, socially isolated, indoor, sleep-deprived, frenzied, poorly nourished lifestyle,” he says.
Ilardi combines group therapy sessions with a set of lifestyle changes, each of which has proven effective against depression: aerobic exercise; ingestion of omega-3 fatty acids; light; positive social interaction; substituting activity for rumination; and increased sleep. The goal is for patients to live more like their Paleolithic ancestors.
The results of the 14-week regimen so far have been encouraging. In an ongoing study of 79 patients, with two-thirds assigned to his therapy and the rest to a control group treated mainly with antidepressant medication or traditional psychotherapy, Ilardi reports a 74% favorable response, compared with 16% for the controls.
Research Credit: Ran Prieur
Canadian Company Demonstrates 16 Qubit Quantum Computer
February 15th, 2007If these guys have a 16 qubit system, what does NSA have?
Via: Scientific American:
A Canadian manufacturer today unveiled what it called “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer.” D-Wave Systems, Inc., “The Quantum Computing Company,” during a much ballyhooed rollout at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., hailed the new device as a big step toward the age of quantum computing, decades earlier than scheduled.
But experts say the announcement may be a bit—er—premature. Even if the computer were to work as advertised, it still would be nearly 1,000 times too small to solve problems that stump ordinary computers. Moreover, researchers do not know whether it will work at bigger sizes.
“There are still a lot of ifs and maybes here,” says quantum computing researcher Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he credits D-Wave for its willingness to test the idea. “From the scientific perspective,” he says, “what they’re doing is very interesting.”
A working quantum computer is the dream of every national security official and hacker on Earth. The bits inside existing computers constantly flip between 0 and 1 as they perform small steps such as “if 0, then 1.” But quantum physics allows particles like atoms, electrons and photons to be in two places at once—meaning they can represent 0 and 1 simultaneously, allowing more complex calculations.
Researchers believe that by combining many of these quantum bits, or qubits, they will be able to perform certain tasks that are currently out of reach. Chief among them: the ability to swiftly crack encrypted communications.
PROPOSED U.S. LEGISLATION: EXIT TAX
February 15th, 2007As wealthy people attempt to flee America, the U.S. Government is planning to rob them at gunpoint with a tax on UNREALIZED gains on their property!
The proposal generally subjects certain U.S. citizens who relinquish their U.S. citizenship and certain long-term U.S. residents who terminate their U.S. residence to tax on the net unrealized gain in their property as if such property were sold for fair market value on the day before the expatriation or residency termination (“mark-to-market taxâ€). Gain from the deemed sale is taken into account at that time without regard to other Code provisions. Any loss from the deemed sale generally is taken into account to the extent otherwise provided in the Code, except that the wash sale rules of section 1091 do not apply. Any net gain on the deemed sale is recognized to the extent it exceeds $600,000 ($1.2 million in the case of married individuals filing a joint return, both of whom relinquish citizenship or terminate residency).
Related: An Exit Tax Coming
10 Stocks to Last the Decade, Revisited
February 15th, 2007Fortune should be called, How to Lose a Fortune.
Via: Fool:
Back in the summer of 2000, Fortune, a highly respected publication and home to many fine pieces of journalism over the years, published an article titled “10 Stocks to Last the Decade.”
An easy enough challenge, one might surmise — simply picking 10 companies that would, umm … not disappear. Actually, the article promised more than that. These stocks were specifically predicted to be winners, according to the piece’s introduction:
“Given the market’s recent volatility, a few of our picks could experience drops over the coming months and years. But if you’re a long-term investor, these 10 should put your retirement account in good stead and protect you from those recurring nightmares about the stocks that got away.”
Here’s the list, and how they’ve done since:
Company Returns since August 2000
Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM) (78%)
Charles Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW) (51%)
Enron Oops
Genentech (Nasdaq: DNA) 121%
Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) 0%
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) (45%)
Nortel Networks (Nasdaq: NT) (96%)
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) (53%)
Univision (42%)
Viacom Kind of hard to explain
Several Readers Contribute to Cryptogon
February 14th, 2007Thank you all very much!
JB $35
JS $35
General Patton $6
The New PSYOP Payload: Bird Flu and the Collapse of the Internet
February 14th, 2007I’m still paying attention to the fallout from the incident involving the root DNS nodes. In the course of following that story, I came across the Strong Angel III operation, which proposed a scenario involving a pandemic avian flu outbreak with follow-on strategic information warfare attacks.
Today, Slashdot linked to a story from last June that I hadn’t come across:
Would the Bird Flu Kill the Internet, Too? Long quote, but stick with it, especially the part near the end:
If a bird flu pandemic sweeps the nation, we could avoid infection by working from home via the Internet.
Or, hammered by overuse, the Internet could shut down within two to four days of an outbreak, eliminating telecommuting as a viable option.
Disturbingly, that was one finding of a simulation, or war game, held in January in Davos, Switzerland, by the World Economic Forum and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. More than 30 senior industry and governmental executives played out the arrival of the flu in Germany from Eastern Europe — and the results weren’t pretty.
“We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet,” said participant Bill Thoet, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton. “We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network, where everyone was trying to access their office from home, would be overwhelmed. The absence of maintenance was also a factor. The person who brought up the problem was himself a CEO of an Internet service provider.
“The conclusion [of imminent collapse] was not absolute, and the situation was not digitally simulated, but the idea of everyone working from home appears untenable,” Thoet said.
On this side of the Atlantic, predictions about how the Internet would fare in the face of a pandemic are less dire.
“We don’t believe that the Internet will be compromised within a matter of hours or days,” said Brent Woodworth, worldwide manager for IBM’s Crisis Response Team, which does consulting on disaster preparedness. “Most Internet traffic is reroutable, and as different areas are affected at different rates by a pandemic, the networks could anticipate increased traffic and adjust accordingly — with the caveat that critical components will be maintained.”
I’m not going to even deal with the fact that Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. was involved with this, or that the topic was addressed at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland. Someone could probably make a career out of following up those points alone.
I want to focus on nine words from the excerpt above. I’m sure you propellerheads already know which nine words I’m talking about:
…With the caveat that critical components will be maintained.
One more time, from my informal essay on information warfare written in 2002:
You always hear that the Internet was designed to route information around dead or crowded nodes. Well, what you don’t hear is that this theory only applies when the amount of traffic on the system DOES NOT OVERWHELM the routers, switches and communications media. If transcon and intercity OC-192s and OC-768s start going down, the sudden traffic overflow onto the lower tiered intercity connections will bring everything to a grinding halt. Couple that with attacks on root DNS nodes and DOS attacks on systems still standing…
Put a fork in it, ladies and gentlemen. It’s done.
But wait, there’s more. This was just published yesterday: Flu Pandemic Could Choke Internet, Requiring Usage Restrictions:
Many companies and government agencies are counting on legions of teleworkers to keep their operations running in the event of an influenza pandemic. But those plans may quickly fall apart as millions of people turn to the Internet for news and even entertainment, potentially producing a bandwidth-choking surge in online traffic.
Such a surge would almost certainly prompt calls to restrict or prioritize traffic, such as blocking video transmissions wherever possible, according to business continuity planners who gathered on Friday at a SunGard Availability Systems hot-site facility in northern New Jersey to consider the impact of a pandemic on the Internet.
Businesses as well as home users likely would be asked to voluntarily restrict high-bandwidth traffic, the planners said. And if asking didn’t work, they warned, government action to restrict traffic might well follow.
“Is there a need for a YouTube during a national emergency?” [OR A CRYPTOGON, OR A LIFEAFTERTHEOILCRASH OR A WHATREALLYHAPPENED?—Kevin] asked John Thomas, vice president of enterprise systems at a large, New York-based financial institution that he asked not be identified.
Whether the avian flu will morph into a human pandemic is unclear. But if it does, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths could result worldwide. To try to limit a pandemic’s spread, many people will seek to work from home. Consequently, “the demand for communication will soar,” said Renate Noone, vice president of professional services at SunGard’s Availability Services unit.
Out of the vast, swirling cloud banks of speculative collapse theories, They seem to like this Bird Flu / Internet Collapse dog and pony show right now.
Remember what I said about that astonishing Brzezinski episode?
I don’t think that it’s possible to know which trick is going to be pulled with any precision. But they’re going to have to try to fit ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag, and soon. The question is how to blame “the terrorists†for the crash without the thing leading to nuclear war. I’m guessing that this Brzezinski thing is like saying, “Don’t do it ‘that’ way. Go back to the drawing board. We don’t want it to play out like ‘that.’†Iraq is clearly out of control. Add Iran to the mix? I don’t see how they maintain any level of control (militarily, politically, economically, take your pick) with an order of magnitude increase in the chaos on the ground. I think this crossed Brzezinski’s mind, and the minds of his handlers.
Is it possible that “the terrorists” have become too ridiculous of a meme for even the average imbecile on the street to believe anymore? The problem with 9/11 is that the dust settled too quickly. Uncomfortable questions started appearing way too fast… I don’t personally know anyone who believes the official 9/11 story anymore.
Hell, maybe they’ll throw in Bin Laden for bonus shock and awe value: Flying around on a magic carpet, spraying the Homeland with terrorist cooties and worse. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Why not? That way, They get the effects of 9/11, but it keeps on killing and terrifying people long after the “attack” begins…. You can almost see Cheney’s crooked grin.
So, how could They improve on “the terroristst” PSYOP payload?
It’s impossible to know for sure…
But if the Internet goes down, life as you know it ends and soldiers are going door to door making sure that you have received your required “vaccination” against whatever .mil engineered plague has just been released, you’ll pretty much have your answer.
Preview: FLU PANDEMIC: NEW ZEALAND’S MARTIAL LAW CONTINGENCY PLAN
The biggest question I have is how many Americans, Aussies and Poms were in on this. Kiwis, in general, and even Kiwi politicians, aren’t this adept at evil. I’d look to the usual suspects for the genesis of this diabolical plot. Again, I don’t know where this script came from, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s from here.
Mission Accomplished: Iraq Closes Borders and Extends Curfews
February 13th, 2007Via: Guardian:
The Iraqi government today said it would close its borders with Syria and Iran and extend a night curfew in Baghdad as part of its new security plan.
Lieutenant General Abboud Qanbar, the commander leading the latest attempt to curb violence in Baghdad, announced the measures on Iraqi state television.
Gen Qanbar said the border with Iran would be closed for 72 hours. He did not say how long the border with Syria would be closed for, but extended frontiers mean any attempt to seal the borders would be extremely hard to enforce.
Scientist Finds New Ocean in Inner Earth
February 13th, 2007Etidorhpa? I couldn’t resit.
Via: Science Blog:
A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping — diminishing — deep in the Earth’s mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth’s deep mantle.
Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, working with former graduate student Jesse Lawrence (now at the University of California, San Diego), analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms and found a large area in Earth’s lower mantle beneath eastern Asia where water is damping out, or attenuating, seismic waves from earthquakes.
The traditional method seismologists use to image the Earth below us is to measure the speed of seismic waves. This will provide a sort of CAT scan of the Earth’s core and mantle. Using wave speeds alone is a problem, however, because they cannot distinguish between temperature and composition variations.
The research is described in a forthcoming monograph, Earth’s Deep Water Cycle, which is in press to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
Direct Correlation Between Computing Power and Doom?
February 13th, 2007An 80 core CPU? Massively parallel home computers? I don’t know whether this news is more absurd or obscene.
Oh sure, better games, HDTV, AI. Notice how none of this crap has anything to do clean air, food and water? How many cores will a CPU need in order to provide people with clean air, food and water?
Does that sound silly?
Not half as silly as the fact that the avatars in that creepy Second Life thing use up as much electricity as Brazilians living their real lives.
But this is a low power chip!
Ahh, so the Matrix will be powered by wave, wind and solar power, and the terminator robots can have more juice allocated to biomechanics because their brains will be Energy Star Compliant! Slap a Green Peace sticker on the ass end of that thing and bow down before it!
We’ll be a broke, chipped, surveilled and controlled in ways we probably can’t even imagine yet, but the desert of the real won’t seem so bad because our TVs and computers will have all those cores, and our Second Lives in the machine will melt away the bothersome issues with our real lives…
Or so Intel would have you believe.
Via: BBC:
A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel.
The Teraflops chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.
The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.
The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.
…
There are already specialist chips with multiple cores – such as those used in router hardware and graphics cards – but Dr Mark Bull, at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, said multi-core chips were forcing a sea-change in the programming of desktop applications.
“It’s not too difficult to find two or four independent things you can do concurrently, finding 80 or more things is more difficult, especially for desktop applications.
“It is going to require quite a revolution in software programming.
“Massive parallelism has been the preserve of the minority – a few people doing high-performance scientific computing.
“But that sort of thing is going to have to find its way into the mainstream.”
Related: All Electric Vehicles and the Concept of Enough
Olmert: “Netanyahu Established Hamas, Gave it Life”
February 13th, 2007Well, well, well…
It’s weird, these precious few moments of clarity.
Via: Jerusalem Post:
According to Olmert, he would attend the meeting to explore possibilities for a “diplomatic horizon.” An argument then broke out between the prime minister and Netanyahu when the opposition leader accused Olmert of giving in to Abbas.
To that, Olmert replied, “Netanyahu has gone back to being the same old Netanyahu,” and accused him of directly contributing to strengthening the Hamas movement by releasing the movement’s founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, during his term as prime minister.
“Netanyahu established Hamas, gave it life, freed Sheikh Yassin and gave him the opportunity to blossom,” he said, adding that the current political situation in the Palestinian Authority came about “because of the nonsense that was done while Netanyahu was prime minister.”
