Art from Urnes

I know very little about "Viking Art". I came across photos of the Urnes Stave Chruch today - a "World Heritage Site". I think the style of wood carving is awesome.


This reminds me of "Art Nouveau" - the art movement popular around 1900 ("Art Nouveau was characterized by writhing plant forms"...). Art Nouveau was supposedly "new" and different. The Urnes style metal piece here would be quite at home in an Art Nouveau collection. The Urnes style seems to be the parent (or great-grandparent) of that style. So it seems that Art Nouveau is not new at all (but very few art styles are).

From a site on Viking Art:

Urnes 1040 - 1150 AD - The last and most widely spread of the ornamentation styles.

Wood-carvings on a stave church in Urnes, Norway, has given the name for this style.

Motifs:

The animals are curvaceous, often including one or more snakes.
The spiral hip is still used but not as big and pronounced as in earlier styles.
The animals often bites each other.
Big almond shaped eyes.
A true Scandinavian style with few influences from abroad.

This style is also called rune-stone style because it is used mainly on rune stones in Sweden. It is a style that has been perfected for carving in stone or wood though it is based on long curves without to many details. The style was widely spread in the Viking World and can easily be said to be the most popular af all Viking ornamentation styles.
________________________

I wonder if Urnes Stave Church had anything to do with Urnenfelder (meaning urnfield carriers) which were a people who utilized cremation as opposed to inhumation (interment of dead). I came across this about "Urnenfelders" when I was looking into things, today:

A new vision of life had arisen; its centre was Lausitz, a land between Germany and Poland. Worship of forces of nature gradually evolved towards certain forms of monotheism and generated the faith in afterlife and a profound respect of dead....

Ancient historians identified these peoples by the name Veneti, referring to them as the people who conquered peacefully half of Europe, not by force but by means of their shining spiritual energy...

We know of the ancient Veneti's social structure that it was based on village (or town) community and that woman's position was equal to male -- unlike a typical patriarchate of other Indo-Europeans. As it is usually the case, the best records of a civilization are left to us by the remains of burials and same is true for Veneti...

The primigenial religion of the ancient Veneti preserved this sense of harmony among the Universe's elements, likewise the oriental religions.

The "Language of the Universe"

Galileo Galilei is reported to have said "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe"

Considering beauty from a mathematical and/or an artistic perspective....From a wikipedia article on Mathematical beauty:

Most mathematicians derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and from mathematics in general. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a creative activity. Comparisons are often made with music and poetry.

Bertrand Russell expressed his sense of mathematical beauty in these words:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. (The Study of Mathematics, in Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays, ch. 4, London: Longmans, Green, 1918.)

Paul Erdős expressed his views on the ineffability of mathematics when he said "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."

I can see where people see mathematics as beautiful - truth, simplicity, perfection. I take issue with the notion that art is an appeal to "part of our weaker nature" - or that to express that which cannot be easily put into an equation (or words) is somehow "less than". I think it is a failure or our society to not value that which has not been quantified - and esp. to denigrate positive emotions and attempts to describe Nature in various ways - as if the emotions and the expression of them are a form of "weakness".

I found this article, Fractal Expressionism, a mathematical analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings, linked from the wikipedia page on Mathematics and Art.

I think it's funny that for some people - Pollock's paintings have value because they are able to quantify them - there is some formula that they fit into. As if people are unable to see something and know truth and beauty when they see it - to know whether something "speaks" to them or not. But maybe it's just a matter of knowing the language. They learned the language of mathematics - so they see things with that language. I learned the language of art - so I see things with that language. (Though I think that for me - the language that I recognize in art is esp. that language in which people are inspired by Nature).

Based on the analysis of Pollock's paintings - apparently he was able to "speak" in multiple languages - a language that can be understood by math and science, as well as art.

Example: Finally we note that, because D follows such a distinct evolution with time, the fractal analysis could be employed as a quantitative, objective technique to both validate and date Pollock's drip paintings. In conclusion, Pollock's contribution to the evolution of art is secure. He described Nature directly. Rather than mimicking Nature, he adopted its language - fractals - to build his own patterns.

I think this is similar to what I have been trying to do. And to use the language of Nature - you can't copy someone else - you have to find it for yourself. But that people are inspired by/learn from others. That's how I see it anyway.
__________________________________________________

As I was writing this - someone else in the house was playing a recording of Huun-Huur-Tu (Tuvan throat-singing). That could also be a "language of the universe" - that the Tuvans tapped into - and express in their own way. The description of their music is "This world-famous ensemble from Tuva uses the vocal technique to create high and low notes at the same time, imitating the natural world of the Central Asian steppes."

I think it's just a matter of recognizing it - the "Language of the Universe" (and people's various expressions of it) when you see or hear it. Some people do - some people don't. Some people recognize it when they hear/see/read it one way - some people do another way. Some people may be disconnected and are not trying to hear/see/read about it in any form. Or maybe some people just have a completely different idea of the essence of the universe and truth. That could be what.

An "Off-Switch" for Greed

Study Spots the Brain's Selfishness 'Off-Switch'
(article seen on Yahoo - published in the Oct. 6 issue of Science)

Civil society may hinge on a tiny piece of tissue at the front of the human brain, a new study suggests.

Experiments involving a "fairness" game show that the right side of this region -- called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- helps people suppress selfish urges in obviously unjust situations, even at their own expense.

When researchers used a mild electric current to temporarily short-circuit this area, the law of the jungle quickly reasserted itself.

People with disabled right-side dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes grabbed whatever money they could from lopsided transactions -- even when they knew the deal they were getting was grossly unfair.

"They understood the unfairness of it all, but they simply couldn't inhibit their need for getting the money," said Paul Sanberg, director of the Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa....

The Swiss and American team behind this research noted that, despite a long history of crime, wars and rapaciousness, human beings are innately cooperative. In fact, Homo sapiens is the only species to exhibit "reciprocal fairness" -- the punishment of others' unfair behaviors, even in situations where doing so hurts the punisher....

The experiment shows that this part of the cortex "is clearly very important for our social behavior, our societal evolution," Sanberg said. The right side of the DLPFC helps people resist those strong urges for sex, money and general acquisitiveness that come from more primitive sites outside the cortex, he said.

"It provides modulation of those urges, so that you can have control over them," Sanberg added. "As we evolved, we somehow developed this control over our basic needs."

One intriguing line of research is whether the right-side DLPFC functions similarly in everyone -- even hardened criminals or sociopaths.

"This is a very interesting question which we are just exploring now," Fehr said. "Preliminary results suggest that the right DLPFC has very different activation across individuals."

The Moon and Colors

Full moon tonight. I went out at midnight - the sky is clear - and it is as bright as it could be in the middle of the night - without artificial light. Strong shadows.

I read recently that conventional wisdom is that you can only see in black & white in moonlight - but that some people can see colors. I was glad to read that because I knew that I had seen colors with moon light. And I knew that I wasn't imagining it.

I can see colors tonight. Like the leaves of the coleus plants. Some are bright green, some medium, some burgundy. The burgundy colors are harder to see without direct moonlight. There are also some yellow petals on some volunteer flowers in a pot. Can't make out the color of the centers so much - mostly that they are dark.

I can't make out the colors of things (like flowers that I know to be colorful) from much of a distance. I seem to have to be within 10-15 feet m/l.

The article that I read said that it has to do with ones rods and cones and some people's rods and cones are more sensitive than others.

There was an owl out there howling in the moonlight also - too far away - I couldn't see it. Mostly it was quiet.
_______________________________

P.S. I went out the next night - when the moon was supposed to be at 98% - but it was another cloudless night - and it was noticably more difficult to see colors. The yellower colors seemed to show up more than others.

Jellyfish News

Schools of huge
Echizen jellyfish...

off Wakasa Bay
in Maizuru,
Kyoto Prefecture.


Numbers of the jellyfish, which has an umbrella measuring about one meter in diameter, began increasing off the bay after Typhoon No. 13 passed over the Sea of Japan in mid-September.
______________________________________________

Meanwhile - off of the coast of California -

Giant turtle noshing jellyfish off Point Reyes

Sea turtles the size of sports cars are swimming off the Marin County coast, chowing down on jellyfish...

Leatherback turtles typically visit the California coast in the fall and congregate around Monterey Bay. This year, however, the turtles could be zeroing in on the Marin Coast instead.

The leatherback, an extremely rare reptile that tolerates waters too chilly for other sea turtles, can grow up to 9 feet long and weigh a ton. It's unclear why it's showing up so far north.

"You usually start hearing of sightings sometime in late summer or early fall," he said. "Last year, they were off the San Mateo coast, and now they appear to be north of the Golden Gate. Wherever they go, they're looking for jellyfish."

At least one large leatherback recently was spotted fairly close to the Point Reyes Peninsula, gobbling jellyfish the size of dinner plates....

______________________________________________

And in Canada (Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island, British Columbia) -

Rash of dead jellyfish washing up

Beachcombers should be on alert, as the annual completion of the Lion's Mane jellyfishes' life cycle means the gelatinous creatures are washing up on shores across the region.

"We're getting a lot more along the coast this year. I'm not sure why," says Mary Arai, a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary who specializes in the aquatic creature. "If you handle them even after they're dead they will give you a rash."

The Lion's Mane ranges from the Arctic to Mexico and lives in Atlantic and Pacific waters. Their bells can reach more than two metres across with tentacles that trail as much as 30 metres. Juveniles are pink with colouring changing towards reddish brown or purple as they age.

In April, bottom dwelling polyps bud off of baby jellyfish. By July, juveniles have become full size. Adult males release sperm, where it's gathered by females who brood the eggs internally then release beings no larger than a pin, which drift to the bottom.

Most adults die by October due to bacterial infection or depleted plankton supplies. Arai says jellyfish on the beach aren't unusual.

"It's a matter of the life cycle. After they spawn they die and wash up on shore."

"War Responsibility"

I stumbled across this account of the "Showa War" (WWII). I thought it was pretty interesting. The typical war patterns - the hype and all. I've pieced together a few snips from various editions.

WAR RESPONSIBILITY - What should we learn from Showa War?

The War Responsibility series, which started in August last year in The Yomiuri Shimbun, covered the period from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 (sixth year in the Showa era) until the end of the fighting in 1945 (20th year in Showa era).

In the early years of the Showa era, or late 1920s and '30s, election-related corruption, including bribes and treating voters, was routine. These acts amplified voters' distrust in political parties and created room for the government to interfere in elections....

The starting point of the Showa War was the Manchurian Incident that took place in September 1931. Who should be blamed for having caused the incident? The main instigators of the incident were Kanji Ishihara and Seishiro Itagaki, staff officers of the Kwantung Army, a unit of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Determined to conspire together to grab power and lead the country, they became the masterminds of the act of aggression into Manchuria (currently part of northeastern China) and literally dragged the nation into a series of wars....

As it was for the Japanese government and military, the Manchurian Incident of September 1931 also was a major turning point for the media.

After the incident, each newspaper sent many correspondents to China and reported each action by the military in detail. The reports inflamed the Japanese people, who subsequently became increasingly hawkish.

Public opinion that Manchuria and Inner Mongolia should be protected by all means because they were the empire's lifeline became entrenched thanks to the media coverage.

Each newspaper followed developments such as the concept of establishing Manchukuo as an independent nation, the Lytton Report produced by a League of Nations commission to resolve the Manchurian Incident and Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations....

After the Sino-Japanese War started after the Feb. 26 Incident, the government rapidly tightened its media controls. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the cabinet of Fumimaro Konoe, which by then had decided to dispatch troops to northern China, brought together representatives of media organizations and asked them to cooperate for the sake of national unity. The government focused on a strategy to publicize its propaganda and newspapers went along with the plan.
__
Oppression of human rights also tightened domestically. Backed by fears of terrorism and coups that emerged in the public after the Feb. 26 Incident in 1936, politics buttressed by military police dominated the nation.

People who criticized the war or did not actively cooperate with the government and the military were quickly suppressed by the military police. Politicians, liberal theorists, social critics and scholars were targeted.

Writers were not allowed to publish their works unless they demonstrated that they believed the war would be won and they were willing to cooperate with the government and the military.

"On Creation"

In his recent book... E.O. Wilson (Harvard research professor "the father of sociobiology and biophilia" - "the most acute student of ants among contemporary scholars")...

Hopes Christians Will Join in Preserving All God's Creation



...He'll reach out to anyone if he thinks they can help the natural world -- that many-splendored universe that long ago, as he roamed fields and swamps of the Gulf Coast, replaced religion as a focus for his spiritual impulses.

He summons a favorite saying from Camus that evokes a lifetime's quest: "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"Pastor, we need your help," Wilson writes. "The Creation -- living Nature -- is in deep trouble." At the present rate of destructive human activity, "half the species of plants and animals on Earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century.

...By 2050, according to estimates Wilson cites, climate change alone could account for "extinction of a quarter of the species of plants and animals on the land." And that's without factoring in other causes of species loss: habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, human overpopulation and overharvesting.

One consequence of inaction, Wilson notes, is that in less than 20 years, the decline in freshwater ecosystems could leave 40 percent of the world's population facing chronic water scarcity. Peter Seligmann, CEO of Conservation International -- on whose board Wilson sits -- outlines another this way: "Loss of forest means loss of insects; loss of insects means loss of pollinators; loss of pollinators means loss of food, crops . . . "

The good news? Much progress could be made by protecting what conservation biologists call "hot spots," those areas -- covering less than 3 percent of the Earth's surface -- where endangered species are most highly concentrated.

The bad news? As a threat, biodiversity loss is much harder to explain than climate change (though the science behind biodiversity hasn't generated as much controversy). This complexity makes it more difficult to get people's attention.

Haze from Indonesia fires...

...chokes region, spreads across Pacific

A worsening acrid haze from land-clearing fires in Indonesia on Thursday shut more schools here, disrupted travel in Malaysia and drifted thousands of kilometres across the Pacific, officials said.
The annual illegal burn-off in Indonesia, which officials have been accused of doing little to stop, sees choking smoke billow across the region, with Malaysia, Singapore and southern Thailand usually worst affected.

But on Thursday, the haze had spread 3,600 kilometres (2,250 miles) to smother islands in the western Pacific, authorities there said....

The fires have been raging on jungle-clad Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo island, and Sumatra, closing schools in Indonesia, delaying flights and forcing residents to don face masks as they cope with the bad air.

Satellite images taken over Borneo on Wednesday showed that although the number of hotspots -- large areas with high temperatures indicating fires -- had dropped in West and Central Kalimantan to 395, the number in South Kalimantan had more than quadrupled from a day earlier to 561.

"The governor has ordered all schools, from kindergarten to high school, to close as of today (Thursday) and only reopen Monday," said West Kalimantan local official Emmy Putrimas, from the provincial capital Pontianak.

Putrimas said people were wearing masks that were being distributed on the streets to try to cope with the deterioration in air quality...

Planets Found

This is an image of one-half of the Hubble Space Telescope field of view in the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). The field contains approximately 150,000 stars, down to 30th magnitude....The green circles identify 9 stars that are orbited by planets with periods of a few days. Planets so close to their stars with such short orbital periods are called "hot Jupiters." These are considered "candidate" exoplanets because most of them are too faint to allow for spectroscopic observations that would allow for a precise measure of the planet's mass.

From physorg.com.

The planet bonanza was uncovered during a Hubble survey, called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS). Hubble looked farther than has ever successfully been searched for extrasolar planets. Hubble peered at 180,000 stars in the crowded central bulge of our galaxy 26,000 light-years away. That is one-quarter the diameter of the Milky Way's spiral disk. The results will appear in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

Five of the newly discovered planets represent a new extreme type of planet not found in any nearby searches. Dubbed Ultra-Short-Period Planets (USPPs), these worlds whirl around their stars in less than one Earth day. ...

The planets are called "candidates" because astronomers could only obtain follow-up mass measurements for two of them due to the distance and faintness of these systems.... The planet candidate with the shortest orbital period, named SWEEPS-10, swings around its star in 10 hours. Located only 740,000 miles from its star, the planet is among the hottest ever detected. It has an estimated temperature of approximately 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

"This star-hugging planet must be at least 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter, otherwise the star's gravitational muscle would pull it apart," said SWEEPS team member Mario Livio. "The star's low temperature allows the planet to survive so nearto the star."

"Ultra-Short-Period Planets seem to occur preferentially around normal red dwarf stars that are smaller and cooler than our sun," Sahu explained. "The apparent absence of USPPs around sun-like stars in our local neighborhood indicates that they might have evaporated away when they migrated too close to a hotter star."

The Nobel Prize in Physics (2006)...

goes to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". (From physorg.com)

US space scientists John Mather and George Smoot were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for a pioneering space mission which supports the "Big Bang" theory about the origins of the Universe.

The pair were the key minds behind a NASA mission to measure the aftershock of the cataclysmic explosion that occurred some 13.7 billion years ago and gave birth to the cosmos.

The unmanned spacecraft, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, not only gave flesh to the skeletal notion of the "Big Bang," which had developed in academic circles in the late 1940s, but also offered clues as to how and when the first galaxies came into being.

The results from COBE were "the greatest discovery of the century, if not all times," the British physicist Stephen Hawking has said.

- Gunnar Öquist (L), permanent secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and Per Carlson, chairman of the Nobel committee "These measurements... marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science," the Nobel jury said in its citation.

Mather, 60, is a senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, while Smoot, 61, is a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Mather was lauded for his work on so-called blackbody radiation -- a telltale pattern in the energy spectrum which comes from a body that is cooling down.

At its birth, the Universe was 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,432 degrees Fahrenheit). Since then, according to the Big Bang theory, the radiation has gradually cooled as the Universe has expanded.

This so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation -- the shockwave of energy that issued from the blast and is still radiating across the expanding skies as limits of the Universe are pushed back -- is barely 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, which is minus 273 degrees Celsius.

COBE was launched in November 1989.

The first results were received after nine minutes of observations, providing "a perfect blackbody spectrum," in other words -- as predicted -- a temperature profile of the Universe at that point after the Big Bang, the Nobel panel said.

When the curve was later shown at an astronomy conference, the results received a standing ovation.

"There really is not a good alternative explanation for having such a perfect black body spectrum. Many people looked, but no good explanation was found, so the Big Bang theory is confirmed by that spectrum," Mather said Tuesday in an interview with the Nobel Foundation.

Smoot's prize was for measuring tiny variations in the temperature of this radiation, thus proving the direction of the force of the Big Bang and the still-continuing expansion of the Universe.

These temperature differences also amount to fingerprints for cosmic sleuths, as they are the thresholds at which the matter in the infant Universe comes together.

Without this aggregation, nothing in today's Universe -- the galaxies, stars, life itself -- would exist....

"Paradise Lost"

Some snips about the tragedy that struck the Amish recently.

They are grieving, but not angry

America has had school massacres before, but never an aftermath as uniquely strange as this one. The day after the attack that left five girls aged between 7 and 13 in hospital mortuaries, their faces horribly disfigured by the bullets that killed them, and another five terribly injured, the Amish who live here took their remaining children to schools by buggy — and then retired quietly to their homes to pray: both for the victims, and for Charles Roberts, the man who shot them before turning his 9mm semi-automatic pistol on himself.

Violence of the modern world assails pacifist Paradise

Amish women, who sew the family’s entire wardrobe, always in black with more colourful matching pastel shirts and blouses, never use anything shiny, such as a zipper or a metal button, specifically because those things are so common on military uniforms. And the men, from the day of their marriage, grow a beard but not a moustache, because having both would too closely mirror generals of the past who they regard as tyrannical.

Guns may not be unknown in the homes of more liberal sects in Lancaster County — some Mennonites, for example, drive black cars stripped of their chrome instead of riding in carriages — but the sight of an Amish man at a National Rifle Association meeting would be ludicrous. Their faith preaches strict adherence to peace and against murder.

....Despite commonly owning guns they are strict pacifists, even if attacked. “Death is not threatening to us as Christians. Hopefully the attacker will have at least had a glimpse of the love of Christ in our nonviolent response”

Another country

How can it be that he chose to inflict his revenge for some slight he suffered at the age of 12 on girls from a community whose very existence is the antithesis of the act he committed? The Amish are pacifist. At times of war they are conscientious objectors, prepared for civilian duties such as running fire departments but refusing anything military. The community where Roberts exacted his revenge, 50 miles west of Philadelphia, has no police force and no guns....

The facts on 'femicide'

The murder of the Amish schoolgirls is not the first time, by any means, that women or girls have been singled out for death. In 1989, when misogynist Marc Lepine stormed into a college in Montreal, Canada, and shot 14 young women dead, feminists began to demand that police categorise such killings as "femicide", for the same reason that racially motivated murders are named as such. Since then, hundreds of thousands more women and girls have been murdered by men around the world. Different circumstances, different methods, but all for the same reason: hatred of females, and a desire to exercise power over them....

_______

It was very odd, anyway that the initial reports were that the killer partly killed the girls for "revenge" (as if - as he said that he had molested young relatives when he was 12 - that his previous actions were a cause for his "revenge" now.) He wrote, "I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself hate towards God and unimaginable emptyness..."

He had what sounded like a stable family life (wrote that his wife was "perfect") but was obsessed with wanting to harm girls. And this was partly explained also because he had a daughter who died 20 minutes after being born. (That doesn't explain it, either).

It is such a contrast. The Amish with their community - they seem to have such a sense of inclusiveness - of being a group. They all accept so many things that set them apart from the larger culture - rejecting much of what has turned out to be negative for life on the planet. And while I'm sure that not everything is perfect in "Paradise" - it does seem that the people are quite cohesive and have quite the support group.

The killer had his nuclear support group - a wife, sons. He was not outwardly estranged. At any rate - it was quite the class of cultures - the violent vs. the pacifist. And the girls were the targets. As if they ever did anything to hurt him - besides exist.

Twisty's Boobython

Twisty gets it and expresses it better than anyone I know of.

There is a "pink ribbon" group - that to support breast cancer research is doing a thing where women (and men - but that's beside the point) are encouraged to send pictures of their breasts and then other people pay $50 to ogle them (as a donation). And what if all of the women sent pictures like the one Twisty has with this post - the picture of a breast cancer survivor after a mastectomy. Would the people paying $50 feel like they had been cheated? How do the "pink ribbon" people think this is supposed to make mastectomy women feel? As if they are in some sort of solidarity? That isn't the message that I am getting.

(Twisty is donating $1 to Breast Cancer Action for each person who posts that they are NOT sending her a photo of their breasts. You gotta love her.)

The Breast Cancer Action people that Twisty links to - also get it. I recommend donating to them if you want to donate to somebody. They also have advice on avoiding Parabens & Phthalates - things esp. found in women's cosmetics - largely unregulated in the US - but which are regulated in Europe (though there are organizations set up to fight that, also).

"There is no pre-market health or safety screening for cosmetics. In fact, the $35 billion dollar beautry industry has been largely self-regulated in the US, which results in not much regulation at all." (Corporate Cover-Up: The regulation of our Cosmetics).

Personal Care Products That Contain Chemicals Linked to Cancer, Birth Defects, and Other Reproductive Problems Detailed list (from EWG).

Article in the Nation from 12.04 : New Power for 'Old Europe'

Article from the Wall Street Journal 4.04 (posted at Organic Consumers Association): Cosmetic Companies Debate Removing Carcinogenic Chemicals from Products

From the Society of Cosmetic Chemists (NYC)

A new European Union chemicals regulation will be passed by the European Parliament in early 2007. Although this is a chemicals regulation, the cosmetics industry has not been exempted and will be impacted. REACH stands for Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of CHemicals. All cosmetics ingredients manufactured and sold within the European Union or those imported in after REACH takes effect will require a registration number. Finished goods that are imported into the European Union will require documentation that all individual ingredients are similarly registered.

The REACH regulation shifts the burden for data generation and risk assessment from the regulators to the manufacturers and importers. No existing chemicals are grandfathered. A key principle is NO DATA, NO MARKET.

As far as "shifting the burden" In the US - there are virtually no regulators, anyway. But it has been interesting to see the US manufacturers have to comply with the EU's regulations if they want to sell over there - it shows that it can be done and that companies are willing to do it if they must.

It seems that really - this would be easier for a large company to do unless there were reliable studies done for various ingredients (and their combinations) with data that anyone could access.

While cancer-causing agents can come from a variety of sources - known and unknown - it makes sense for a women's campaign against cancer to take on the cosmetic industry - what with as many women who use those things.

Breast Cancer Action also endorses Prevention First with the motto: "Public Health before Private Profit".

"Alaskan storm cracks iceberg in Antarctica"

I included this just because it's an example of something happening one place that affects something happening somewhere else. Often people don't figure out the connection.

A bad storm in Alaska last October generated an ocean swell that broke apart a giant iceberg near Antarctica six days later, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

The waves traveled 8,300 miles to destroy the iceberg, said Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago and Emile Okal at Northwestern University.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, they said their study shows how weather in one region can affect events far away.

"One of the things we're debating in the world right now is whether global warming might increase the storminess in the oceans," MacAyeal said in a statement.

"The question we then pose is: Could global storminess have an influence on the Antarctic ice sheet that had never been thought of?"

The researchers were watching icebergs using satellite images, and saw that on a clear, calm day last October, a big iceberg known as B15A broke into half a dozen pieces.

MacAyeal and colleagues had put seismometers and other instruments on the 60 mile long iceberg and on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf...

The seismometer record showed that although it was mild and clear, the iceberg had been moving up and down and from side to side.

"I was surprised at the level of amplitude that we were recording," Okal said. The researchers figured a storm somewhere may have generated waves, which are known to travel long distances.

They did some calculations and saw the swell must have come from more than 8,000 miles or 13,500 km away.

They looked at records from wave buoys in between.

"We saw that the waves in Alaska were about 35 feet (10 meters) tall and then two days later they were down to 15 feet as they passed Hawaii on their way south," MacAyeal said.

And three days later, a sensitive seismometer on Pitcairn Island in the south Pacific recorded the waves' passage.

"We think that B15A was in the right position where these waves would be fatal to it," MacAyeal said.

Extinction Explanations

An article in Scientific American goes into the mechanism by which global warming could have affected mass extinctions.

The author mostly focuses on photosynthetic sulfur bacteria of the green and purple varieties - doesn't mention jellyfish. But since jellyfish have been around through the extinctions - it stands to reason that they were mostly able to withstand the conditions that he describes.

One of the indicators is the lack of oxygen in the ocean - something that seems to be occurring more frequently these days.

Highlights from Impact from the Deep:

Five times in the past 500 million years most of the world's life-forms have simply ceased to exist. The first such event happened at the end of the Ordovician period, some 443 million years ago. The second, 374 million years ago, was near the close of the Devonian. The biggest of them all, the Great Dying, at the end of the Permian 251 million years ago, wiped out 90 percent of ocean dwellers and 70 percent of plants, animals, even insects, on land [see "The Mother of Mass Extinctions," by Douglas H. Erwin; Scientific American, July 1996]. Worldwide death happened again 201 million years ago, ending the Triassic period, and the last major extinction, 65 million years ago, concluded the Cretaceous with the aforementioned big bang....

New fossil analyses indicated that the Permian and Triassic extinctions were drawn-out processes spanning hundreds of thousands of years. And newly obtained evidence of the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon, known as carbon cycling, also seemed to suggest that the biosphere suffered a long-running series of environmental insults rather than a single, catastrophic strike.

...within the past few years scientists began sampling the mass extinction boundaries....data from the periods of mass extinction, other than the K/T event, suggested that the world's oceans have more than once reverted to the extremely low oxygen conditions, known as anoxia, that were common before plants and animals became abundant.

Among the biomarkers uncovered were the remains of large numbers of tiny photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria. Today these microbes are found, along with their cousins, photosynthetic purple sulfur bacteria, living in anoxic marine environments such as the depths of stagnant lakes and the Black Sea, and they are pretty noxious characters. For energy, they oxidize hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas, a poison to most other forms of life, and convert it into sulfur. Thus, their abundance at the extinction boundaries opened the way for a new interpretation of the cause of mass extinctions.

Because these microbes can live only in an oxygen-free environment but need sunlight for their photosynthesis, their presence in strata representing shallow marine settings is itself a marker indicating that even the surface of the oceans at the end of the Permian was without oxygen but was enriched in H2S.

...if oxygen levels drop in the oceans, conditions begin to favor the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria, which proliferate and produce greater amounts of hydrogen sulfide....The horrific result would be great bubbles of toxic H2S gas erupting into the atmosphere....

Enough of the toxic gas would have permeated the atmosphere to have killed both plants and animals--particu-larly because the lethality of H2S increases with temperature. And several large and small mass extinctions seem to have occurred during short intervals of global warming. That is where the ancient volcanic activity may have come in.

Around the time of multiple mass extinctions, major volcanic events are known to have extruded thousands of square kilometers of lava onto the land or the seafloor. A by-product of this tremendous volcanic outpouring would have been enormous volumes of carbon dioxide and methane entering the atmosphere, which would have caused rapid global warming. During the latest Permian and Triassic as well as in the early Jurassic, middle Cretaceous and late Paleocene, among other periods, the carbon-isotope record confirms that CO2 concentrations skyrocketed immediately before the start of the extinctions and then stayed high for hundreds of thousands to a few million years.

But the most critical factor seems to have been the oceans. Heating makes it harder for water to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere; thus, if ancient volcanism raised CO2 and lowered the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and global warming made it more difficult for the remaining oxygen to penetrate the oceans, conditions would have become amenable for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of H2S. Oxygen-breathing ocean life would have been hit first and hardest, whereas the photosynthetic green and purple H2S-consuming bacteria would have been able to thrive at the surface of the anoxic ocean.

The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place.

"Oil, Lily Pad Bases and Torture"

Post over at Juan Cole - Re: Craig Murray on Manufacturing Terror

The Bush administration has been about "the Greater Middle East" (including Central Asia). It has been about basing rights in those areas. It says it is fighting a "war on terror" that is unlike past wars and may go on for decades. It has been about rounding up and torturing large numbers of Iraqis, Afghans and others. This region has most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves.

Why is the Bush administration so attached to torturing people that it would pressure a supine Congress into raping the US constitution by explicitly permitting some torture techniques and abolishing habeas corpus for certain categories of prisoners?

...torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren't really any, or aren't very many, or aren't enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget.

He explained what is really behind the new "lily pad" doctrine of US bases, whereby the US is seeking to encompass the "Greater Middle East" with small bases, each with 1,000 to 3,000 personnel. In emergencies, these bases could quickly swell to 40,000. Like a lily pad, they can "open up" and accommodate a landing frog. Murray said that the US documents are quite open as to why they are seeking the network of lily pad bases around the Middle East. It is because that is where the oil and gas are. If you include the Caspian region, Tengiz, and the gas reserves in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan along with what is in the Persian Gulf, the vast majority of proven oil and gas reserves are in this circle of crisis...

Bush needs torture for the same reason as Karimov does. He needs to generate false information that exaggerates the threat to his regime, so as to justify repression. He needs the ritual of confession and naming others, to have it down on paper so he can show it to Congress behind closed doors. But Bush/Cheney's ambitions are global, not just internal... (more)

Also - see David Corn's post - This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like

___

People defending torture are saying things like:

"Flush the geneva convention B.S down the toilet and let's start making the rules as we see fit...."

"These animals understand one thing: violence.... "

___

I suppose that those people have heard the pro-torture meme over and over by the right-wing talking heads. I remember the morality debates that we had in high school. Most of us are just amazed that people can condone the sort of thing that had been condemned our entire lives. AFAIC - there is no justification and not only is the torture abominable - it is a crime that our country is turning good people into criminals - people who are required to lose their humanity - to become depraved torturers in the name of "patriotism".