n: vb: the spice of imagination
via Scott:
Aside from all the other amazing things that life consists of, this evening I am made happy by passionfruit gelato, chickie nobs, and the line, “Someone’s being attacked by a platypus bear!”, upon which, indeed, a platypus bear appeared onscreen, truly one of nature’s more creative miracles.
Also, the incredible people and technology involved in the Chilean miner rescue. That too.
A new name for high fructose corn syrup:
The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make the syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient “corn sugar,” arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer confusion about the product.
“Clearly the name is confusing consumers,” said Audrae Erickson, president of the Washington-based group, in an interview.
“I’m not eager to help the corn refiners sell more of their stuff,” Dr. Nestle wrote in an e-mail. “But you have to feel sorry for them. High-fructose corn syrup is the new trans fat. Everyone thinks it’s poison, and food companies are getting rid of it as fast as they can.”
Although food label changes aren’t common, the F.D.A. has allowed name changes in the past. The ingredient first called “low erucic acid rapeseed oil” was changed to “canola oil” in the 1980s. More recently, the F.D.A. allowed prunes to be called “dried plums.”
Anime director Satoshi Kon dies, aged 46.
Kon passed away passed yesterday after losing a battle with pancreatic cancer.
The filmmaker’s work includes Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Paprika.
Kon was working on fantasy-adventure animation, “Yumemiru Kikai (Dream Machine)”, due for release in 2011, at the time of his death. Featuring a futuristic adventure starring a robot, it would have been his first work aimed at children after he produced a series of what he called “animations which adults can enjoy”.
As of today it’s been one month since the April 20th Gulf oil spill explosion. Given the fickle nature of news on the internet, it seems clear that there’s only a narrow window of opportunity in which to harness the global attention being given this catastrophe. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the information that’s been, pardon the pun, floating around.
While BP’s Oil Gushes, Company Keeps Information to a Trickle
BP hasn’t yet been able to stop the flow of oil, but it’s been more successful at controlling the information coming out about the Gulf disaster.
McClatchy reported on Tuesday that BP has been withholding the results of “tests on the extent of workers’ exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning crude over the Gulf.” The data is important to determining whether current conditions are safe for workers in the Gulf, researchers told McClatchy. BP said it’s sharing the data with “legitimate interested parties,” but would not release it publicly. […]
BP has maintained there’s “just no way to measure” the oil flow, even as the company turned down scientists offering to measure it with techniques that could yield a more accurate result. A BP spokesman told The New York Times that calculating the flow is “not relevant to the response effort.”
Shocking NASA Image: Never-Seen-Before Southeast Oil Slick Arm
A startling new image released by NASA today shows a massive column of oil extending out Southeast towards the open ocean. This column has not been visible in any satellite photos taken so far and will no doubt change the estimated extent of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
Coast Guard Now Enforcing BP’s Oil Spill Viewing Rules
When a crew from CBS News tried to film an oil-covered beach in Louisiana, they were stopped and threatened with arrest by a group of BP contractors and members of the Coast Guard. “This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours.”
Besides lying to everyone about the extent of the damage, and the company’s culpability in the spill, BP has started to wield its power over the US government by having the Coast Guard keep prying journalists from seeing the effects on Louisiana’s shoreline. Governor Bobby Jindal had recently visited the site, telling reporters, “This wasn’t just sheen, we were seeing heavy oil out there.” When the CBS News crew arrived to film the area, BP’s muscle showed up, too.
Blackwater’s PR Guy Has a Few Words of Advice For BP
BP’s image is so damaged at this point, more than three weeks into the catastrophe, that it’s hard to think of a company that’s been so universally reviled in the past. Actually, it’s not. There’s Blackwater. The private military company was so despised for its conduct in Iraq—which included killing Iraqi civilians then bribing people to be quiet about it—that it had to change its name to Xe Services. So we called up Xe’s spokesman, Mark Corallo, and asked him if he had any advice for BP. […]
Of course, BP’s first public relations gambit was blaming Transocean, the company they leased the oil rig from. “Nobody’s buying that. It shows that you’re living in this bunker mentality.”
Also, don’t say that the immeasurable environmental, personal and economic catastrophe you’ve created is “tiny,” no matter how besieged you feel by the media and the public. “Don’t go and sell that one,” Corallo said. “You’re already on a life raft with one paddle. This is like saying ‘Hey let’s throw the other oar into the water and make sure we throw chum to the sharks so they come and get us.'”
The latest video footage of the leaking Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico show that oil is escaping at the rate of 95,000 barrels — 4 million gallons — a day, nearly 20 times greater than the 5,000 barrel a day estimate BP and government scientists have been citing for nearly three weeks, an engineering professor told a congressional hearing Wednesday.
The figure of 5,000 barrels a day or 210,000 gallons that BP and the federal government have been using for weeks is based on satellite observations of the surface. But NASA’s best satellite-based instruments can’t see deep into the waters of the Gulf, where much of the oil from the gusher 5,000 feet below the surface seems to be floating. […]
He said the calculation could be off by 20 percent — meaning the spill could range from between 76,000 to 104,000 barrels a day. But Wereley said he would need to see videos that were not compressed and showed the flow over a longer period so that it would be possible to get a better calculation of the mix of oil and gas from the wellhead. “The true extent of this spill remains a mystery,” Markey said. He said the BP had said that the flow rate was not relevant to the cleanup effort. “This faulty logic that BP is using is… raising concerns that they are hiding the full extent of the damage of this leak.”
BP Spill Responders Told to Forgo Precautionary Health Measures in Cleanup
Fishermen have never seen the results from the air-quality monitoring patches some of them wear on their rain gear when they are out booming and skimming the giant oil slick. However, more and more fishermen are suffering from bad headaches, burning eyes, persistent coughs, sore throats, stuffy sinuses, nausea, and dizziness. They are starting to suspect that BP is not telling them the truth.
And based on air monitoring conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a Louisiana coastal community, those workers seem to be correct. The EPA findings show that airborne levels of toxic chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds like benzene, for instance, now far exceed safety standards for human exposure.
In Gulf Spill, BP Using Dispersants Banned in U.K.
BP is using two products from a line of dispersants called Corexit [4], which EPA data [2] appear to show is more toxic and less effective [5] on South Louisiana crude than other available dispersants, according to Greenwire.
Salazar calls for tighter regulations covering petroleum industry
The massive spill that has pumped oil into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly a month has laid bare the need for regulations covering the industry to be tightened, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday. “Do the laws need to be changed?” he asked the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in one of his two Senate committee appearances of the day. “The answer is yes.” […]
Many of the nation’s environmental sensitivity index maps, which summarize what coastal resources are at risk if an oil spill occurs nearby, are outdated, said Jane Lubchenco.”Twenty-one of 50 atlases are more than 10 years old,” said Lubchenco. “Many of them do not reflect current information.” […]
NOAA has suspended fishing in 19 percent of the Gulf over which the federal government has jurisdiction, Lubchenco said. That’s up from 10 percent that NOAA had ordered closed to fishing Monday. The expansion means 45,728 square miles are now closed to fishing.
Matter of Trust using donated hair, fur, fleece, feathers and nylons to clean up oil spill
“Your Haircut is a Life Saver” is the slogan on one of the posters of the national nonprofit ecological organization Matter of Trust, which has called upon the nation’s hair salons, groomers, wool and alpaca farmers and individuals to donate hair clippings and nylons to help make hair mats and hair booms that will soak up the oil still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.
Legal immunity cannot hold. The Vatican should feel the full weight of international law
Well may the pope defy “the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. But the Holy See can no longer ignore international law, which now counts the widespread or systematic sexual abuse of children as a crime against humanity. The anomalous claim of the Vatican to be a state – and of the pope to be a head of state and hence immune from legal action – cannot stand up to scrutiny.
The truly shocking finding of Judge Murphy’s commission in Ireland was not merely that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and, despite knowledge of their propensity to reoffend, allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their victims had been sworn to secrecy.
This conduct, of course, amounted to the criminal offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors.
As Meredith points out, “Especially interesting is the part later on in the article where he points out that the Vatican is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I wonder if we will actually see this brought to the European Court of Human Rights. Or the ICC.”
Bishop ‘blames Jews’ for criticism of Catholic church record on abuse
A furious transatlantic row has erupted over quotes that were attributed to a retired Italian bishop, which suggested that Jews were behind the current criticism of the Catholic church’s record on tackling clerical sex abuse.
A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a “Zionist attack” was behind the criticism, considering how “powerful and refined” the criticism is.
The comments, which have been denied by the bishop, follow a series of statements from Catholic churchmen alleging the existence of plots to weaken the church and Pope Benedict XVI.
Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: “They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.”
A Wisconsin prosecutor is warning that teachers who teach the state’s new sex education curriculum could be arrested and charged with contributing to the delinquency of children.
Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth told the Wisconsin State Journal that the state’s sex education law, which was signed by Gov. Jim Doyle in February, is a “sick and shameful piece of legislation” that encourages illegal sex among minors. And he sent a letter to five school districts urging them to temporarily drop all sex education classes until the Legislature can repeal the law.
“Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender,” Southworth wrote in the March 24 letter. “It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks.”
California Schools Ban Dictionaries for Containing Lewd Information
Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex”.
Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate”, according to the area’s local paper.
The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.
School Outlaws “Sexual Bending”. Educators issue rules covering grinding, other dance offenses.
While dancing back to front, all dancers must remain upright – no sexual bending is allowed. Examples are, no hands on knees, and no hands on the dance floor with your buttocks touching your dance partner. There will be no touching of the breasts, buttocks or genitals. There will be no straddling of each others’ legs. Both feet must remain on the dance floor at all times. Students will be given wrist bands at the door. One warning results in a teacher cutting off the wrist band. A student dancing inappropriately with no wrist band will be asked to leave the dance. This may result in loss of dance privileges for the year.
The dance will be videotaped to insure the safety of all students attending.