Dead sperm whales – What’s up?

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Reply

I think something strange is going on in our oceans and it doesn’t bode well… several widely spread stories about dead sperm whales washing up on beaches.

December 15, southern hemisphere: A sperm whale stranded on Anthony’s beach near Stanley, Tasmania

January 10, Florida: Sperm whale found dead on Boca Raton beach, Florida

January 11, much further north: Dead sperm whale washes up on Edinburgh beach, Scotland

January 12, Uruguay: Sperm whale body stuns, draws crowd in Uruguay

January 13, 13 smaller whales, southern hemisphere: Whales wash up at Farewell Spit, New Zealand

2013 saw a dramatic increase in meteor fireballs – What does 2014 have in store?

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
2

2013 saw a dramatic increase in meteor fireballs – What does 2014 have in store?

Fireball Increase 3.0

… if our true history shows us one thing, it’s that when a civilization is thoroughly corrupted and infected by psychopaths in power, to the extent we’re seeing in our world today, and when people just sit back and allow it to happen, our environment seems to respond in a rather unpleasant way…

Think metadata isn’t intrusive? Read this

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Reply

Amazing! Watch the video to see how metadata about you is mapped and interpreted.

Think metadata isn’t intrusive? Read this

ou’ve probably heard politicians or pundits say that “metadata doesn’t matter.” They argue that police and intelligence agencies shouldn’t need probable cause warrants to collect information about our communications. Metadata isn’t all that revealing, they say, it’s just numbers.

But the digital metadata trails you leave behind every day say more about you than you can imagine. Now, thanks to two MIT students, you don’t have to imagine – at least with respect to your email.

Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov’s Immersion program maps your life, using your email account. After you give the researchers access to your email metadata – not the content, just the time and date stamps, and “To” and “Cc” fields – they’ll return to you a series of maps and graphs that will blow your mind. The program will remind you of former loves, illustrate the changing dynamics of your professional and personal networks over time, mark deaths and transitions in your life, and more. You’ll probably learn something new about yourself, if you study it closely enough. (The students say they delete your data on your command.)

Whether or not you grant the program access to your data, watch the video embedded below to see Jagdish and Smilkov show illustrations from Immersion and talk about what they discerned about themselves from looking at their own metadata maps. While you’re watching, remember that while the NSA and FBI are collecting our phone records in bulk, and using advanced computer algorithms to make meaning from them, state and local government officials can often also get this information without a warrant.

When President Obama said that the phone surveillance program “isn’t about” “listening to your telephone calls,” he was deflecting attention from the terrifying fact that there’s nothing currently stopping the government from amassing and data-mining every scrap of metadata in the world about us. He made it sound like metadata spying isn’t a big deal, when it’s pretty much the golden ticket.

Metadata surveillance is extremely powerful, and we are all subject to it, constantly. If you want to see something resembling what the NSA sees when it looks at your data, give Jagdish and Smilkov’s program a try. Then tell the government: get a warrant.

UK weather: Environment Agency issues flood warnings for whole of England and Wales

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Reply

Wow! UK and USA simultaneously! Hmmm… is there a cosmic statement there?

UK weather: Environment Agency issues flood warnings for whole of England and Wales

With the UK suffering the worst band of winter storms in more than 20 years, the Environment Agency has been forced to issue flood warnings in every single region across England and Wales.

The agency currently has around 350 alerts in place across the country as a whole, including three severe warnings which indicate there is a “danger to life”.

Last night a flood siren warning of extreme danger to people and property was sounded in Dorset, as gales and tidal surges battered the coast.

The Environment Agency raised the alarm after its sea defences were breached at Chiswell Beach in Portland last night, following on from a severe flood warning in the area.

Dorset Police told families to move to an upstairs room facing away from the sea and arm themselves with flood kits.

The Met Office said a further band of heavy showers will hit the south and southeast today, and will continue to cause a localised flooding risk throughout Tuesday and into early Wednesday.

To Protect And Infect Part 2 (Jacob Applebaum)

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Reply

If you don’t think it is scary in the first half, just wait until you get close to the end. You know, all these years when I’ve been saying “I think they beam stuff into people’s heads” that do any number of things – make you foggy in the head, make you angry, make you stupid, give you cancer – well, guess what? Apparently I’m not nuts. Applebaum shows the leaked documents describing this technology and activity. And you will be shocked by a whole bunch of other stuff. Just freaking mind/heart-stopping. (Not a pun or an irony here.) Watch all the way even if you don’t grok tekkie-talk.

Co(s)mic Influences in Nuclear Decay?

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Reply

My husband is having fun again…

Co(s)mic Influences in Nuclear Decay?

Cosmic Rays

© Simon Swordy (U. Chicago), NASA

This article is a continuation of the previous one “Cosmos reflecting on a nuclear level“. Here I will deal with some details of the whole co(s)mic story. Indeed, it has cosmic proportions, but it also has a bit of a comic side.

Just few days ago I finished writing a preliminary version of a chapter for my book on Quantum Fractals. The title of this particular chapter is “Stochastic nature of quantum measurement processes.” “Stochastic” is just a different name for “random”, and “random” is just a different word for “we do not understand why things happen and we can’t predict the outcomes, though we seem to be able to predict averages”. There are many things around us that may be considered as “random”, not only lottery numbers. But are they really random? This is the subject of the chapter that I wrote, where I had in mind “quantum events” that are often considered as “truly random” – no one can predict, for instance when a given radioactive atom is going to split into parts. Or so we think. But is that really so?

I do not have an answer to this question, but I wrote more or less what I know about various aspects of the problem. So, I wrote my chapter and sent it for comments to one of the top experts in nuclear decay research, prof. A. G. Parkhomov from Moscow Lomonosov University (see my previous post for more details on this subject). At the same time, since I was also discussing some mathematical issues in the same chapter, I asked another colleague, mathematician and statistician J.S., in the USA, for his critical comments. In response, I received an encouraging message from Moscow and a discouraging message from the US.

Well, I am joking a little bit. Prof. Parkhomov pointed me to a 2004 paper by Falkenberg – and I will tell more about this case below. My mathematician friend pointed out several errors with my English and also several inappropriate mathematical terms that I was using. He also noticed that, at one point, when I was writing the word “cosmic”, I wrote, in fact “comic”. He laughed about it because he himself is very skeptical about any possibility of cosmic influences. He thinks I am not just naive with my openness – I am even “dangerous”. I thought that the game of co(s)mic influences is trying to tell us something, so I included it into the title of this article.

You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

What’s Wi-Fi doing to us? Experiment finds that shrubs die when placed next to wireless routers

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
1

WIFI and cell phones are super evil! Avoid! Only use your cell if you have to travel. Get landlines and cables… you’ll be glad you did. And check all the additional story links at the bottom of this article!

What’s Wi-Fi doing to us? Experiment finds that shrubs die when placed next to wireless routers

A group of schoolgirls claims to have made a scientific breakthrough that shows wifi signals could damage your health – by experimenting with cress.

In a twist on the traditional science project of growing cress on a paper plate, the 15-year-olds set out to test whether mobile phone signals could be harmful.

They say the result could affect millions of people around the world.

Pupil Lea Nielsen said: ‘We all thought we experienced concentration problems in school if we slept with our mobile phones at the bedside, and sometimes we also found it difficult sleeping.’

However, because they were not able to monitor their brain activity at their school in Denmark, they chose to monitor plants near wireless routers, which emit similar radio waves to mobile phones.

When the girls grew trays of garden cress next to wifi routers, they found that most of the seedlings died.

In the experiment, they placed six trays in a room without any equipment and another six trays in a room next to two routers.

Over 12 days many of the seedlings in the Wi-Fi room turned brown and died, whereas those in the others room thrived.

Roger Waters: ‘What Israelis do to Palestinians today is comparable to how the Nazis treated Jews last time around’

Posted on by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Reply

Well…

Roger Waters: ‘What Israelis do to Palestinians today is comparable to how the Nazis treated Jews last time around’

FB: You’re talking about yourself being one of the only one, in your position, taking radical political positions. When it comes to Palestine, you are very open about your support for a cultural boycott of Israel. People opposing this tactic say that culture should not be boycotted. What would you answer to that?

RW: I would say that I understand their opinion. Everybody should have one. But I can’t agree with them, I think that they are entirely wrong. The situation in Israel/Palestine, with the occupation, the ethnic cleansing and the systematic racist apartheid Israeli regime is unacceptable. So for an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people’s land and oppresses them the way Israel does, is plain wrong. They should say no. I would not have played for the Vichy government in occupied France in the Second World War, I would not have played in Berlin either during this time. Many people did, back in the day. There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946. So this is not a new scenario. Except that this time it’s the Palestinian People being murdered. It’s the duty of every thinking human being to ask: “What can I do?”. Anybody who looks at the situation will see that if you choose not to take up arms to fight your oppressor, the non-violent route, and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S) movement, which started in Palestine with 100% support from Palestinian civil society in 2004-2005, a movement that has now been joined by many people around the world, the global civil society, is a legitimate form of resistance to this brutal and oppressive regime.

I have nearly finished Max Blumenthal’s book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in greater Israel”. It’s a chilling read. It’s extremely well written in my view. He is a very good journalist and takes great pains to make sure that what he writes is correct. He also gives a voice to the other side. The voice, for instance, of the right wing rabbinate, which is so bizarre and hard to hear that you can hardly believe that it’s real. They believe some very weird stuff you know, they believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on earth to serve them and they believe that the Indigenous people of the region that they kicked off the land in 1948 and have continued to kick off the land ever since are sub-human. The parallels with what went on in the 30’s in Germany are so crushingly obvious that it doesn’t surprise me that the movement that both you and I are involved in is growing every day. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine was trying to shed light on this when we met, I only took part in two sessions, you took part in many more. It is an extremely obvious and fundamental problem of human rights which every thinking human being should apply himself to.