We choose the moon

BOSTON (AP) — Families crowded around black-and-white television sets in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong take man's first steps on the moon.

Now, they'll be able to watch the Apollo 11 mission recreated in real time on the Web, follow Twitter feeds of transmissions between Mission Control and the spacecraft, and even get an e-mail alert when the lunar module touches down. Those features are part of a new Web site from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum commemorating the moon mission and Kennedy's push to land Americans there first.

"Putting a man on the moon really did unite the globe," said Thomas Putnam, director of the JFK Library. "We hope to use the Internet to do the same thing."

The Web site — WeChooseTheMoon.org — goes live at 8:02 a.m. Thursday, 90 minutes before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will track the capsule's route from the Earth to the Moon, ending with the moon landing and Armstrong's walk — in real time, but 40 years later.

Internet visitors can see animated recreations of key events from the four-day mission, including when Apollo 11 first orbits the moon and when the lunar module separates from the command module, as well as browse video clips and photos and hear the radio transmission between the astronauts and NASA flight controllers.

The site also connects the mission back to Kennedy, who first set the goal to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade during a May 25, 1961, speech before Congress.

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And, of course, we all know, it was faked anyway..

* * *

[7/17/09] NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission. In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape. But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much."

"It was a mistake, no doubt about that," Launius said. "This is a problem inside the entire federal government. ... They don't think that preservation is all that important."
Launius said federal warehouses where historical artifacts are saved are "kind of like the last scene of `Raiders of the Lost Ark.' It just goes away in this place with other big boxes."

The company that restored all the Indiana Jones movies, including "Raiders," is the one bailing out NASA.

As part of the moon landing's 40th anniversary, the space agency has been trotting out archival material. NASA has a Web site with audio from private conversations in the lunar module and command capsule. The agency is also webcasting radio from Apollo 11 as if the mission were taking place today.

developing nations unspecific on emissions

L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change.

As President Obama arrived for three days of talks with other leaders of the Group of 8 nations, negotiators for 17 leading polluters abandoned targets in a draft agreement for the meetings here. But negotiators embraced a goal of preventing temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and developing nations agreed to make “meaningful” if unspecified reductions in emissions.

The mixed results underscored the challenges for Mr. Obama as he tries to use his first summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers to force progress toward a climate treaty. With Europe pressing for more aggressive action and Congress favoring a more restrained approach, Mr. Obama finds himself navigating complicated political currents at home and abroad.

If he cannot ultimately bring along developing countries, no climate deal will be effective.

url shorteners

On the short-messaging service Twitter, space is at a premium: You've got 140 characters to make your point, and you probably don't want to waste half of it on a super-sized link to your latest YouTube obsession.

There's an increasingly popular quick fix: a free URL shortener. On one of these Web sites, you can plug in a long Internet address, known as a URL, and it will assign you a much shorter one that is easier to post in e-mails, on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else. Some link-shrinkers let you personalize the new address with a unique phrase such as your name, or show you how many people click the link after you've posted it.

URL shorteners have been around for several years to offer alternatives to long Web links that were too unwieldy to paste into e-mails. Perhaps the oldest and most popular is TinyURL, a free service started in 2002 by Kevin Gilbertson, a unicycle enthusiast from Blaine, Minn., who was tired of seeing URLs get split up in e-mails related to his online unicycle forum.

Now the rise of Twitter and other social Web sites that encourage users to share small bursts of information has spawned several TinyURL followers, whose names run the gamut from the very short — tr.im — to the not long — notlong.com.

Twitter has directly contributed to the prominence of two services in particular: TinyURL and bit.ly, which began in July as a project at New York-based Web media incubator and Twitter stakeholder Betaworks.

Until recently, Twitter automatically shrank lengthy links by running them through TinyURL. But this spring Twitter switched its default link shortener to bit.ly after finding TinyURL unreliable, said Alex Payne, one of Twitter's lead engineers. (Gilbertson said Twitter didn't contact him about the issues or the change.)

Bit.ly is seeing growth that Betaworks Chief Executive John Borthwick called "pretty amazing." About 100 million bit.ly URLs are clicked on per week.

steering with your brain

TOKYO (AP) — Toyota Motor Corp. says it has developed a way of steering a wheelchair by just detecting brain waves, without the person having to move a muscle or shout a command.

Toyota's system, developed in a collaboration with researchers in Japan, is among the fastest in the world in analyzing brain waves, it said in a release Monday.

Past systems required several seconds to read brain waves, but the new technology requires only 125 milliseconds — or 125 thousandths of a second.

The person in the wheelchair wears a cap that can read brain signals, which are relayed to a brain scan electroencephalograph, or EEG, on the electrically powered wheelchair, and then analyzed in a computer program.

Research into mobility is part of Toyota's larger strategy to go beyond automobiles in helping people get around in new ways.

The new system allows the person on the wheelchair to turn left or right and go forward, almost instantly, according to researchers.

New Cancer Treatment Shows Promise in Testing

A new method of attacking cancer cells, developed by researchers in Australia, has proved surprisingly effective in animal tests.

In one striking use of the method, reported online Sunday in Nature Biotechnology, mice were implanted with a human uterine tumor that was highly aggressive and resistant to many drugs. All of the treated animals were free of tumor cells after 70 days of treatment; the untreated mice were dead after a month.

The lead researchers, Jennifer A. MacDiarmid and Himanshu Brahmbhatt, say their company, EnGeneIC of suburban Sydney, has achieved a similar outcome in dogs with advanced brain cancer. “We have been treating more than 20 dogs and have spectacular results,” Dr. Brahmbhatt said. “Pretty much every dog has responded and some are in remission.” These experiments have not yet been published.

Cancer experts who were not involved with the research say that the new method is of great interest, but that many treatments that work well in laboratory mice turn out to be ineffective in patients.

EPS declares carbon dioxide an endangerment

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday (4/17/09) formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that endanger public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that will lead to the regulation of the gases for the first time in the United States.

The E.P.A. said the science supporting the proposed endangerment finding was “compelling and overwhelming.” The ruling initiates a 60-day comment period before any proposals for regulations governing emissions of heat-trapping gases are published.

Although the finding had been expected, supporters and critics said its issuance was a significant moment in the debate on global warming. Many Republicans in Congress and industry spokesmen warned that regulation of carbon dioxide emissions would raise energy costs and kill jobs; Democrats and environmental advocates said the decision was long overdue and would bring long-term social and economic benefits.

cow gas

One contributor to global warming — bigger than coal mines, landfills and sewage treatment plants — is being left out of efforts by the Obama administration and House Democrats to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Cow burps.

Belching from the nation's 170 million cattle, sheep and pigs produces about one-quarter of the methane released in the U.S. each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That makes the hoofed critters the largest source of the heat-trapping gas.

In part because of an adept farm lobby campaign that equates government regulation with a cow tax, the gas that farm animals pass is exempt from legislation being considered by Congress to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA under President Barack Obama has said it has no plans to regulate the gas, even though the agency recently included methane among six greenhouse gases it believes are endangering human health and welfare.

* * *

Vermont dairy farmers Tim Maikshilo and Kristen Dellert, mindful of shrinking their carbon footprint, have changed their cows' diet to reduce the amount of gas the animals burp — dairy cows' contribution to global warming.

Coventry Valley Farm is one of 15 Vermont farms working with Stonyfield Farm Inc., whose yogurt is made with their organic milk, to reduce the cows' intestinal methane by feeding them flaxseed, alfalfa, and grasses high in Omega 3 fatty acids. The gas cows belch is the dairy industry's biggest greenhouse gas contributor, research shows, most of it emitted from the front and not the back end of the cow.

"I just figured a cow was a cow and they were going to do whatever they were going to do in terms of cow things for gas," said Dellert. "It was pretty shocking to me that just being organic wasn't enough, actually. I really thought that here we're organic, we're doing what we need to do for the planet, we're doing the stuff for the soil and I really thought that was enough."

She learned it wasn't. The dairy industry contributes about 2 percent to the country's total greenhouse gas production, said Rick Naczi, a vice president at Dairy Management Inc., which funds research and promotes dairy products. Most of it comes from the cow, the rest from growing feed crops for the cattle to processing and transporting the milk.

To satisfy consumers' demands for sustainable production, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy in Rosemont, Ill., is looking at everything from growing feed crops to trucking milk to reduce the industry's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. That would be the equivalent of removing about 1.25 million cars from U.S. roads every year, said Naczi, who manages the program.

One way is by feeding cows alfalfa, flax and grasses, all high in Omega 3s, instead of corn or soy, said Nancy Hirschberg, head of Stonyfield's Greener Cow Project. The feed rebalances the cows' rumen, the first stomach of ruminants, and cuts down on gas, she said. Another way is to change the bacteria in a cow's rumen, Naczi said.

System Security Virus

6/18/09 Mary C computer HP Pavilion a1213w

Upon booting into Windows XP, the following pops up

System Security
Protect Your PC
Open File Security Warning
Nintendo WFCReg.exe
C:\program files\Wifi Connector

Looking up on the web for a solution.

download MBAM (MalwareBytes Anti-Malware) (had to dl w/ ie since Firefox locked)
run setup, says can't run, infected
boot up into safe mode
install MBAM
run quick scan
found 37 infections
remove selected

restart computer
system security message doesn't show up
run antimalware again
check for updates
run full scan 52 minutes, 48 seconds
no malicious items detected

disk cleanup

download avast
install avast (play freecell while waiting)

scan on reboot
delete files in temporary internet files
HP\9972322\Program\Interop.SHDOCVS.dll
infected by Win32:Adware-gen [adw]

9 - ignore (might be false positive?)

c:\windows\temp\skynet ... temp
etc.
infected by win32.Alvrem.BH [rtk]

1 - delete

remove spyware doctor (out of date)

turn on Windows Defender
quick scan

Suspicious files found (by avast)
c:\windows\system32\drivers\skynetnlxbttvp.sys
delete

search being redirected in ie
virus detected in memory

reboot & scan on boot (twice)
detected and deleted

file windows\system32\SKYNET ... infected
delete


Fri 6/19/09

IE seems OK
Firefox errors out on first run
locks up on retry

Thunderbird reads email ok

uninstall firefox and install latest version
install SP3

run Windows Update until no more updates

Internet Explorer on desktop

install Chrome

install and run ccleaner


Makana's account

slow starting up
deactivate HP Organize from startup (was making startup slow)
deactivate myspace IM from autostartup, put shortcut on desktop
deactivate googletalk from startup, put on desktop
remove wkcalrem from startup
register avast

The Climate Change Climate Change

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.