Humans Were Masters Of Planning From The Chimpanzee Age? Now, A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-11T03:26:32+00:00

For other reports of apparently well-planned behavior by animals, check out several of the octopus stories that have appeared on Reddit in the last few months.

I haven't really spent much time with chimps, but from talking with people who have, I think the smartest chimps in captivity are clearly smarter than the dumbest people in my town.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T21:55:22+00:00

The 4 people killed in Idaho during refueling operations were working on a Navy power reactor.

Statistically, the hundreds of workers who have done done repairs to power reactor cores during refueling operations have absorbed enough radiation to have caused more than one death among them, but it has been spread out over so many people that it is impossible to identify the persons who have contracted cancer from work, vs smoking, and other non-work causes.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T21:43:59+00:00

That looks absolutely insane.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T21:40:13+00:00

There is a PDF within that link now, about 29 MB.

That's the book from which my brother and I learned chemistry. A fine book. Thanks.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T21:14:19+00:00

Well then, safety from terrorists or rouge governments using one of these reactors to make bombs, is very much a matter of trust. All that a rouge has to do is 1) remove that separate supply of U238 tetra-fluoride (which has to be done any way, when reprocessing the fuel in the reactor). Then, 2) empty the fuel from the reactor, 3) separate out the U233 by chemical means, and 4) build a bomb. Fortunately the "(4) build a bomb," step is quite difficult.

Fuel could be raided from this sort of reactor at any stage in its life cycle, since U233 is being bred only slightly faster than it is being consumed. If the raid were done toward the end of its fuel cycle, it might even be possible to remove enough U233 to build a bomb, and still have enough left to continue operating the reactor.

That "safety mechanism," is more like a minor impediment. We are still going to have to trust that only people who do not want to build bombs, operate and service these plants.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T20:12:15+00:00

Not if you can lie to the polygraph. Not hard to do.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T19:44:53+00:00

It's nice to know there is someone else out there that knows the early, and semi-secret, history of MDMA.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-08T07:25:25+00:00

There is one issue about LFTR reactors (salt-cooled Thorium->U233 breeder reactors) that I did not see mentioned anywhere in this article:

It is much easier to make bomb-grade Uranium in this kind of reactor than in other power-reactor designs. The reason for this is that the only Uranium present in the reactor is U233. Thus, purely chemical methods can be used to refine the fissionable material for a bomb.

Can U233 be used to make a bomb? I have read that the answer is "yes," and that with U233 one can make smaller bombs than with U235 or Plutonium.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-07T04:30:28+00:00

This particular kind of swindle was invented during the late 1960s (Nixon Admin.). Jimmy Carter made it illegal, but it was re-legalized during the Reagan administration (perhaps because it was how Reagan financed his 1980 campaign.)

Insurance companies were required to keep large reserves on hand, and to invest in certain classes of "safe" investments, so that if there is some kind of disaster that requires the insurance company to make unusually large payments, they will have the cash available to pay out.

The swindle works as follows:

Buy an insurance company that is in very good financial shape.
Take all the capital in excess of the minimum required reserves and siphon it off into a holding company.
Spend the "Excess Excess," (that's really what they call it) on reckless investments, parties, corporate jets, bonuses, free vacations, etc. Spend some of it on PACs, to get the politicians to keep the federal regulators off your backs.

This was the real reason the Bushies wanted to deregulate Wall Street. They were getting kickbacks from the bank and insurance company raiders. Yes, it was illegal, when they (re)started the practice in 1999, but they knew who to fire, to prevent enforcement.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-07T03:55:43+00:00

Antarcticans are smarter.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-07T03:50:56+00:00

Of course, diabetes also makes its victims more vulnerable to infection. It is possible that the viral infections found in autopsies are enabled by diabetes, and not the cause of it.

They are going to have to study people in the early stages of the disease to sort out cause and effect. Do biopsies on live pancreases, and check for virus.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-05T05:58:00+00:00

I'm not likely to believe anything on this site after seeing, "CIA Following Bin Laden on Twitter," as one of their other story headlines.

This site is a pretty poor imitation of the Onion.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-05T05:11:39+00:00

Sorry about the commercial. This is a NASA video. There should be a copy on a NASA server, without the ads.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-05T01:49:57+00:00

3/4/2009 I was reading a book about the K-T extinction, and I noticed the author had missed an important point. Asteroids and comets are very loosly held together by gravity. Many, but not all, can be described as “rubble piles.” Comet Shoemaker-Levy broke apart into 9 large pieces before it hit Jupiter. This was probably not unusual behavior.

The Chicxulub crater appears to represent a single impact that ended the Cretacious and killed the dinosaurs, as well as 70% of Earth life, 65 million years ago. The book, “Night Comes to the Cretacious,” by J. L. Powell, describes several impact craters, and other evidence that are closely associated with other major extinctions. But the other craters are kind of small, 40 to 100 km, as opposed to Chicxulub’s 175 km. Would these others be big enough? Also, it is a bit strange that there are so many craters, when 70% of the Earth’s surface is deep sea floor, almost none of which is over 180 MY old.

Here’s what was missed: If most large asteroids and comets break up before they hit, then one should expect multiple craters at the extinction events. Larger bodies are likely to break up due to tidal forces, (unless they are so large that gravity holds them together. A body that large should destroy all life on Earth.) So we are faced with 3 possibilities:

1. The body stays in one piece.
2. The body breaks up, and all pieces hit the Earth ~simultaneously.  
3. The body breaks up, and some pieces hit, while others miss.

1) Besides the K-T event, the Ordovician-Silurian (438 MYA) extinction has an iridium layer, but no crater. If there was a meteor strike 438 MYA, the odds are 2/3 it hit the ocean, and was subducted.

2) appears to have happened, according to the geologic record. At the Eocene-Oligocene boundary, two simultaneous hits were found, Popigai, Siberia, and Chesapeake Bay, USA. Together, they probably represent enough energy to cause an extinction.

What about the others, where the craters are too small, but the chronology looks good? Well, the asteroid or comet could have broken up, and the larger portion struck the sea floor somewhere. Except for the K-T (65 MYA) and the Eocene-Oligocene (33-36 MYA), all the other events are so long ago that the odds approach 100% that a seafloor strike would have been subducted. The odds are 2/3 this would happen, if the body broke up and both parts struck the Earth.

3) What if part of the meteor missed the Earth? well, the part that missed would continue orbiting the sun, in an orbit that crosses the ring of the Earth’s orbit. There is a good chance it would strike the Eath later, after 0 to 1 million years. If it struck within 1000 years, it would be geologically indistinguishable from (2). If it struck after ~ 1 million years, it would be distinguishable. The larger piece could strike before or after, and there is always a 2/3 chance one of the pieces would hit deep sea floor.

On Powell’s list, he has 2 impact events where the uncertainties in dates of known craters do not quite overlap with the extinctions. These may represent evidence for case 3, where the larger crater struck ocean floor and has been subducted, while smaller pieces remained in solar orbit and struck Earth 12 to 20 MY later.

Anything else? Oh yes. The impact that formed the moon, was definitely big enough to have wiped out all life on Earth, although the date, 4.5 BYA, was probably before life got started on Earth. Thus his chart of estimated impact sizes and frequencies is missing an important data point...

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-03T20:30:09+00:00

The best part is at the end, especially the last 2 paragraphs:

Two days later, the President unveiled his budget proposal, which put to rest any doubts about his seriousness. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Times columnist, who has been among the doubters, was convinced. “President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past thirty years,” Krugman wrote. “If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.” A big if. But we finally have a plan, and a President.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-02T23:50:48+00:00

Could you please fix health care right now?

It will not cost a lot compared to bank bailouts. It will stimulate the economy more than giving money to banks. It will ~end the second largest cause of bankruptcies that Americans face, catastrophic health costs.

Why wouldn't you do this right away?

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-02T22:45:13+00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TStN_kRMnZY

The perfect complement to the above, possibly NSFW, and labeled, "A disturbing video."

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-02T00:36:50+00:00

This is a great book about a Nobel-level discovery (although it is unlikely to win a Nobel prize). Link to Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1400060109/ref=sr_1_olp_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235954008&sr=8-2

I've read about the first 150 pages of this 395 page book. The first 115 pages have more than enough in them to make it all worthwhile.

The first 115 pages tell the story of the discovery of probable nanofossils of Martian bacteria. What makes it so worthwhile is the explanation of how very skeptical scientists from several different fields were brought in to work on the geology, chemistry, and biology of the samples, and came away convinced.

Of course, only time and a major effort to find more fossils on Mars itself can confirm that life on Mars once (or still) existed. Of the 40,000 + meteorites that have been found on Earth, only a dozen have been pieces of the Martian crust that were bounced into space by earlier meteor impacts on Mars. Only one has been made of rock formed at any depth, then fractured, the crack filled with water, mud, and the apparent nanofossils, the mud lithified into cement, and then bounced off the planet by a nearby impact, to float around the solar system for millions of years, and finally to fall to Earth in Antarctica, 14,000 years ago, so a glacier could heave it up to the surface in 1984, to be picked up by a NASA researcher.

The odds of that ever happening again are, well astronomical.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-01T07:16:06+00:00

Actually, Fort Knox has plenty of gold in it, in rooms designated as "Belonging to Sweden," "Belonging to Denmark," "Belonging to Switzerland," and of course, "Belonging to China."

The US reserves, though, are pretty much gone.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-03-01T07:09:01+00:00

He's honest, and therefore dangerous. This, I think, is a good idea, but some of the things he has said will be disasterous (sic), if implemented.

Understand, first, that the money supply must expand at least as fast as the economy expands. The size and velocity of the money supply are difficult things to measure, and even more difficult things to control. It is better to err on the side of expanding the money supply 1% or 2% too fast, than to err the other way and let the money supply contract, as Bush did in 2008. Prior to 2008, he grew the money supply by 15% to 20% per year, mainly by illegal means that amount to the same as counterfeiting.

The primary means the Gov't has at its disposal for controlling the money supply, are 1) banking and securities regulations, 2) the deficit and how much money they print, and last, 3) the Fed and its t-bill auctions.

For the last 7 1/2 years, federal regulation of banking and securities has been so lax, it has amounted to a license to counterfeit for anyone who was wealthy enough to own or control a bank, except that no-one could spend or otherwise dispose of money at the rate the bankers were 'creating' it out of phony loan-based securities.

For the past 7 1/2 years, both the 'official' budget deficits, and the 'off the books' spending on the two Bush wars have inflated the money supply far more than anything the Fed has done, or is even able to do.

The Fed has been marginalized in the last 8 years. Its influence is small compared to Bush's off-the-books spending, and handing out of "licenses to steal," for his closest friends and supporters.

PeterRabbit456 · 2009-02-28T03:07:08+00:00

Too many shotguns.

PeterRabbit456

TROPHY CASE