"Rock star physicist" Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive complex and describes his part in it -- and the vital role it's going to play in understanding our universe.
"Science affects all of us and it matters to all of us and it will do even more so in the future. The children of today are the adults of tomorrow and they need to have a basic understanding of science if they're going to make the kind of decisions that will affect us all. And we're going to need scientists as well, not just to work on space travel, but to work on issues that face us all like climate change or fuel sources or food production."
The world should be focusing on renewable resources such as wind and solar power. But large energy producers are opposed to these types of energy, Etcheverry says, because renewable energy is diffuse, can be owned and operated by anyone anywhere, and therefore makes it impossible for the large energy companies to continue to dominate the energy market.
"The big challenge for the 21st century is how can we tap into those enormous flows of energy coming from the sun on a daily basis in a manner that can allow us to have the energy services that we are expecting out of our current civilization. To solve the climate crisis, to solve the energy security crisis, to solve the poverty crisis; all these things are inter-related. And the old solutions that we've relied upon have failed us...
"This is not just about environmental protection, this is about prosperity, of creating new jobs that are sustainable for ecosystems, but also very good for society."
Scientific American recently high-lighted some of the exciting developments in solar film technology, acknowledging that
"The sun blasts Earth with enough energy in one hour—4.3 x 10^20 joules—to provide all of humanity's energy needs for a year (4.1 x 10^20 joules)"
And we're getting better at capturing that energy. Spain, Japan, and Australia are leading the way in adopting this technology as part of their energy plans. Will the US follow or will we be caught up in ethanol and biofuels and "clean" coal and nuclear energy before we realize that just better than oil does not mean the best.
"The vision of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 is to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery. All humans should realize the impact of astronomy and basic sciences on our daily lives, and understand better how scientific knowledge can contribute to a more equitable and peaceful society."
Intelligence and Education statistics come from the Tearfund organization as linked previously as well as DOZENS of studies that can be summed up by Paul Bell in an article in Mensa magazine. Bell, Paul. "Would you believe it?" Mensa Magazine, Feb. 2002, pp. 12--13
Matt Gonzales is Ralph Nader's running mate. This week he spoke at UC Berkeley
"It's imperative that we take a playbook out of the successful Christian right's revolution - do you remember that? They would say, if you're a republican, and you don't support them on these issues, you don't get their vote, we don't care that you're a republican. If you're not going to support us on these issues, forget about it.
What I propose is that the progressives put together that litmus test: you vote for the Patriot Act, you can't get my vote ever again; you support the death penalty, can't get my vote ever again; if you support increased military spending, forget it, I'm not interested in how you're 'better' than the other candidate, you can't get my vote."
Over 2.2 million people have already signed the petition condemning the recent work of artist Guillermo Habacuc Vargas. The backlash is due to the nature of an exhibit "Eres lo que lees" - you are what you read spelled out in dog food - that subsisted solely of a dog, chained to the wall, starving to death as people watched. Vargas explains:
"The purpose of the work was not to cause any type of infliction on the poor, innocent creature, but rather to illustrate a point. In my home city of San Jose, Costa Rica, tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought.
Now, if you publicly display one of these starving creatures, such as the case with Nativity, it creates a backlash that brings out a bit of hypocrisy in all of us. Nativity was a very sick creature and would have died in the streets anyway."
As cruel and inhumane his exhibit is, how sickening it is to showcase inflicted starvation right in front of us and call it "art," he has a point. What has he accomplished?
One could argue he sacrificed one poor animal in order to bring the issue of the cruelty of starvation into the forefront. That poor Natividad's life was slowly, torturously, stolen right under a purposefully placed sentence of food serves as a shocking reminder how painful, heart-wrenching, cruel and shameful it is for a living creature to starve to death in the midst of readily edible food.
It is easy to cry foul-play and lament this poor dog's death as meaningless.
I, however, find a vitally important lesson to learn from this cruelty. Stray dogs like Natividad suffer similar fates everyday, not just in the slums of Costa Rica, but worldwide. He dangled unnecessary suffering right in front of us and people are outraged as they should be.
But if it were not for Natividad's visible, tangible sacrifice, how many would still be outraged? Are we upset because this one dog starved to death in the presence of food, or because he forced us to acknowledge that living beings starve to death in the midst of plenty every second of everyday? That stray dogs like Natividad have only a future of hunger, pain, and death and are, by and large, completely ignored?
What if instead of a dog, Vargas had tied up a 2 year old child underneath a sign made out of rice, or corn, or Frankenberries, or deluxe Belgium Mousse? Would we be more outraged that an artist displayed a child literally starving to death under the shadow of a meal on a showroom floor, or that it took an artist to make us wake up to reality?
It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.
The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed, one-third is starving
Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.
Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!
One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5.
In the U.S. hunger and race are related - in 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children
One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
Now I know I am a little late on the Vargas issue, but how is it that 2.2 million people care enough about one dog's starvation death, and yet the starvation deaths of 17 million human children every year don't spark nearly as much outrage? Is it because 17 million is too big a number to swallow, to understand?
Then what about just one child dying from starvation - just try to picture one single little infant, her face sunken, her ribs protruding through her thin skin, her cries so faint and weak you barely notice them, her tears so much more precious because of dehydration, her hunger so powerful and her mother so unable to meet such a simple need, her death so devastating, so earth shattering for her family.
Now realize she is only one of 328,600 children under the age of 5 estimated to die this year - in the industrialized nations! In the least developed nations, 14.2% of all children under 5 each year will die, many completely and easily preventable from cruel causes like starvation. That's over 17 million deaths! Where's the outrage?!! Why does one dog matter more than 17 million human children?!!!
"The best estimates that we have seem to suggest that a vast majority of the Shia, perhaps as much as 80 or 85 percent of the Shia, are now followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. So in the name of controlling Muqtada's militia, they are building a structure in which they in fact need to control the whole of the population in Sadr City, very much on the model of the Israeli tactics and strategy around Gaza."
"The people of Sadr city are outraged that their communication with the rest of Baghdad is being cut off, civilians are being killed and the giant slum's turned into a Gulag."
"One thing we know - the future of the American occupation of Iraq is in his [Muqtada al Sadr's] hands"
Muqtada himself explains:
"The second thing is that the American influence on the Iraqis is even more negative than that of the former Ba'th Party...Therefore, this was occupation, not liberation. I call it occupation. I have said in recent years: Gone is the 'little Satan,' and in came the 'Great Satan'... Resistance automatically appears wherever there is occupation. Allah willing, the US will be vaquished, just like it was in Vietnam... They [Sunni and Shia together] are even capable of gradually liberating Iraq, Allah willing, along with some other resistance forces... Obviously I am close to the Shiites ideologically, but politically, I am close to the Sunnis and the decisions they make... There are plans to divide Iraq - to divide what has already been divided, if I may say so. The Al Sadr movement must oppose this."
"It's practically certain that the Sadrists will win the October provision elections"
"We spent $9 billion on prisons and jails nationwide in 1982. Twenty years later, the figure was $60 billion. It costs about as much to house a prisoner for a year as it does to send a young man to an elite private university--and all prison is likely to teach him is how to commit crime again. Several states spend more on prisons than they do on higher education. Without re-entry, prison will become a revolving door."
The Nation's David Cole looks at the recently passed Second Chance Act aimed to ease the transition of our prison population back into society at large - almost 700,000 this year alone.
"From 1979 to 2005, the US incarceration rate tripled, and drug offenses went from accounting for 6 percent of the nation's prisoners to 25 percent. Today, the United States has 2.3 million people in prison or jail, and boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world--five times higher than the next highest Western country, the United Kingdom."
Something has to be done, and at only $2 a person over a four year period, it's worth it.
"Three hundred and thirty million dollars may seem like a lot of money at first blush--until you realize that we spend more than twice that much every day on the war in Iraq."
How much of that money goes to "rehab" the Iraqi prisoners Saddam released just before we started bombing?
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