They're black bears. They don't get all that big. Though I think 125 is about as light as they get. They're still pretty strong, though. And WTF! Why'd they kill it?
Unfortunately, the actual article doesn't quite live up to the awesomeness of that title, but I think the headline alone is enough to warrant its inclusion in this thread.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Proponents of a ballot measure that would legalize marijuana in California said they have collected enough signatures to qualify the initiative for the state's November 2010 ballot.
The measure's supporters said they have collected 650,000 signatures, exceeding the 433,971 required for the ballot.
"Today we're declaring an overwhelming victory in this important first stage of taxing and regulating cannabis," said proponent Richard Lee in prepared remarks. He runs an Oakland, Calif., school that teaches people to be pot entrepreneurs.
Law-enforcement groups will oppose the measure, said John Lovell, a lobbyist for California police associations. Mr. Lovell said he expected the initiative to make the ballot, but he said it would be easily defeated. "At the end of the day, I think voters' good sense will prevail."
The initiative would legalize marijuana possession for adults 21 and older. It would also allow local governments to tax and regulate the drug's sales. One of the supporter's main arguments is that taxing pot could generate more than $1 billion a year for California, which is projected to face annual $20 billion budget shortfalls until at least June 2015.
An April Field Poll found that 56% of Californians supported legalizing and taxing marijuana as a way to reduce the state's budget deficit. A November Capitol Weekly poll that asked if marijuana should be legalized, without referencing the state's fiscal woes, found that 38% of Californians supported legalization, versus 52% again.
Thad Kousser, a Stanford University political-science professor, said polls taken before the language of a ballot measure has been set tend to be unreliable. But he believes the measure faces challenges, including the possibility that the mood of voters in 2010 will be much less liberal than in 2008.
"It's not impossible, but it's very hard to (campaign) against cops and prosecutors, because people trust cops and prosecutors in California," Mr. Kousser said.
California's Secretary of State must certify signatures gathered by proponents of a measure before placing it on the ballot, a process that can eliminate some signatures found to be invalid. Supporters of the marijuana-legalization measure said they plan to gather even more signatures before submitting them in January.
I'm not a fan of mind altering substances. And I'm also not a fan of dealing with people when they're drunk, high, whatever. But that's just my personal opinion.
Some are adamant about doing otherwise though, and we already let them in one dangerous way, what's a second slightly less dangerous way going to do? Especially since most people who are going to drive while high already do.
I like doing mind-altering stuff every so often. Granted, I've only ever used alcohol and pot, but it's kinda fun to experience the world differently and have your body feel different than normal from time to time. And it makes socializing fun because people get silly.
From a health danger perspective, cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol. It is quite literally impossible to overdose on pot, and as god pointed out you're less likely to kill people while driving, which you're not supposed to be doing anyway. I don't know about the long. As for tobacco, I can't say for sure it is less dangerous, but it certainly isn't more dangerous.
From a more pragmatic perspective, look at the money flow. Every year we spend millions and millions on cop hours chasing after and processing pot smokers who pose little to no real threat to society; and we spend about $40,000 US a year per person just to imprison these people in a jail system that is oversaturated. The money we spend on cannabis is overwhelming, while the cartels make about 70% of their profits just from this one drug.
But what if we legalized it?
The money we were spending on cannabis related crimes would be instantly freed up, along with the tens of millions we are spending incarcerating people whose only crime is wanting to toke up. Furthermore, we could potentially deal serious damage to the business model and supply chain that the cartels use by simply allowing legitimate private businesses to compete for producers. And much of that money would be taxed and sent right to the government and out of the hands of criminals.
And a point that I just came up with while writing this: Given that cartels make 70% of their profits from cannabis, that means that their pay structures and expenses are already structured around a given level of revenue. Taking away these profits would force them to simultaneously take several steps down in lifestyle while forcing them to drastically raise the prices of their other drugs while they try to restructure their business models. Steep rises in prices of cocaine and heroin would deter usage. Therefore, legalizing cannabis could potentially lead to drops of usage of dangerous drugs far greater than what the war on drugs has done on its own.
Most of marijuana's long term health effects are caused by ash inhaled when smoking and the high temperature it burns at. These problems can be lessened or completely avoided depending on the method of intake; if it is vapourized or consumed orally, I don't know that there are any physical health effects. It does contain a number of carcinogens, yet I am not aware of any studies that have found increased risk of cancer in people who use marijuana. It actually promotes cell death (I forget the proper scientific term) and prevents tumors from growing and spreading as quickly in certain types of cancer.
That's what I was gonna point out. The only associated health effect shown is lung problems from smoking. But that is not specific to the marijuana, that's just from inhaling something that's burning.
I gotta say, I'm all for mind-alteration. I could try to defend my views by honestly saying that I'm a huge fan of neuro-biology, specifically how everything in the brain works (including what you can do to the brain to make it work differently), but the truth is... I just think it's fun. It's very interesting to compare sobriety to being drunk or high. Another thing I enjoy about it is I almost always feel better than when I'm sober, haha. I'm kind of a debbie downer when I'm sober because I think through everything that could go wrong with whatever I'm doing and I'm constantly worried about how I can avoid these things... alcohol and/or weed is just a nice little break from my normal self.
That being said, you gotta be responsible about it. Just as I know PLENTY of people who get away with drinking every single weekend and still make good grades, I know people who smoke every weekend and make good grades as well. Just set aside a specific time where you don't have to be responsible, understand what you're getting yourself into, and don't let anything get out of hand.
That's another thing about weed. There's nothing physically addicting in it-- the only addiction that comes from pot is psychological addiction. It's not like alcohol or cigarettes. If you really want to stop smoking weed, you should have NO trouble because the only thing that's making you smoke is yourself (along with maybe a little peer pressure).
The New York Daily News reports that comedian Joan Rivers was among the many travelers to get snared in the heightened-security frenzy that overtook airports after the December 25th failed terrorist attack. Rivers wasn’t allowed on her Newark-bound flight in Costa Rica this past weekend by a “jittery Continental Airlines gate agent” who thought the two names on her passport, which reads “Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers,” seemed “fishy.” Rivers wrote of her experience:
“If I were going to make up an alias, I wouldn’t pick Rosenberg. I’d pick Jolie or Pitt…Do terrorists wear Manolo Blahniks? I can tell you Donna Karan does not make anything that hides a bomb…I tried the tears; they didn’t work. I tried reasoning. I couldn’t bribe because I didn’t have any money. I said ‘I’m going to have a heart attack over this,’ so the woman called the paramedics.”
Rivers ultimately found someone who “took pity on her” and drove her 6.5 hours to Costa Rica’s main airport in San Jose to get her on a flight back to the U.S. on Monday. Rivers, a wealthy celebrity diva, isn’t necessarily the most sympathetic victim of post-Christmas Day terrorist hysteria, but the New York Daily News notes that many New York-area travelers are reporting similar horror stories. Rivers claims she was signing autographs at the Costa Rican airport while gate agents refused to let her on the flight. Meanwhile, Newark airport ended up shutting down for several hours on Sunday after a man accidentally walked undetected through a secure area.
Yeah I was amazed by that on the news. Who is this person though, and are they being ironic? Because that's pretty cringe worthy even if it's a comedy act.
U.S. filmmaker Dan Woolley was shooting a documentary about the impact of poverty in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He could have died, but he ultimately survived with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him to treat his wounds.
After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.
“I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me,” said Woolley, recounting the earthquake to MSNBC. “It all happened incredibly fast. David yelled out, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and we both lunged and everything turned dark.”
Woolley’s incident highlights a large social implication of the iPhone and other similar smartphones. A constant internet connection, coupled with a device supporting a wealth of apps, can potentially transform a person into an all-knowing, always-on being. In Woolley’s case, an iPhone app turned him into an amateur medic to help him survive natural disaster.
Say what you will about the iPhone. This story is incredible.
Wow, that IS incredible. See, THIS is what technology can do for us... information can be a powerful thing. I mean, what if he was trapped with like 10 other wounded survivors? He could have potentially administered first aid to them all with the knowledge gained from his phone.
Score one for the internet. One of man's greatest achievements, even if people don't always think about it like that. The past century has seen huge strides in many fields (look at transportation: horses to space travel in the span of less than 60 years) and communications and information tech are definitely one of them.
The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO2 ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.
Liquid glass was invented in Turkey and the patent is held by Nanopool, a family-owned German company. Research on the product was carried out at the Saarbrücken Institute for New Materials. Nanopool is already in negotiations in the UK with a number of companies and with the National Health Service, with a view to its widespread adoption.
The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.
Food processing companies in Germany have already carried out trials of the spray, and found sterile surfaces that usually needed to be cleaned with strong bleach to keep them sterile needed only a hot water rinse if they were coated with liquid glass. The levels of sterility were higher for the glass-coated surfaces, and the surfaces remained sterile for months.
Other organizations, such as a train company and a hotel chain in the UK, and a hamburger chain in Germany, are also testing liquid glass for a wide range of uses. A year-long trial of the spray in a Lancashire hospital also produced “very promising” results for a range of applications including coatings for equipment, medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages. The war graves association in the UK is investigating using the spray to treat stone monuments and grave stones, since trials have shown the coating protects against weathering and graffiti. Trials in Turkey are testing the product on monuments such as the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara.
The liquid glass coating is breathable, which means it can be used on plants and seeds. Trials in vineyards have found spraying vines increases their resistance to fungal diseases, while other tests have shown sprayed seeds germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, and coated wood is not attacked by termites. Other vineyard applications include coating corks with liquid glass to prevent “corking” and contamination of wine. The spray cannot be seen by the naked eye, which means it could also be used to treat clothing and other materials to make them stain-resistant. McClelland said you can “pour a bottle of wine over an expensive silk shirt and it will come right off”.
In the home, spray-on glass would eliminate the need for scrubbing and make most cleaning products obsolete. Since it is available in both water-based and alcohol-based solutions, it can be used in the oven, in bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and almost every other surface in the home, and one spray is said to last a year.
Liquid glass spray is perhaps the most important nanotechnology product to emerge to date. It will be available in DIY stores in Britain soon, with prices starting at around £5 ($8 US). Other outlets, such as many supermarkets, may be unwilling to stock the products because they make enormous profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly, and liquid glass would make virtually all of them obsolete.
Something like that is going to need a wealth of approvals from various government agencies like the FDA before being a practical product in the US, especially if farmers want to start coating their foods in it.
That being said, it certainly does sound interesting.
This sounds awesome! I have also purchased magnets to help with my circulation and recipes to transmute lead to gold. So this seems like the next logical purchase.
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Beer drinkers now have a good excuse to order another round -- the brew may help keep bones strong, a study has found.
Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, have found beer is a rich source of silicon and may help prevent osteoporosis, as dietary silicon is a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density.
These were the findings after researchers tested 100 commercial beers for silicon content and categorized the data according to beer style and source.
Previous research has suggested beer contained silicon but little was known about how silicon levels varied with the different types of beer and malting processes.
"We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer," researcher Charles Bamforth said in a statement.
The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, found the beers' silicon content ranged from 6.4 milligrams per liter to 56.5 mg per liter. The average person's silicon intake each day is between 20 and 50 mgs.
The researchers found there was little change in the silicon content of barley during the malting process as most of the silicon in barley is in the husk, which is not affected greatly during malting.
They found pale ales showed the highest silicon content while non-alcoholic beers, light lagers and wheat beers had the least silicon.
"Beers containing high levels of malted barley and hops are richest in silicon," said Bamforth.
"Wheat contains less silicon than barley because it is the husk of the barley that is rich in this element."
But Bamforth told reporters that the results shouldn't be taken too serious. The study examined the beers but it did not look at bone mineral density or analyze patients' data.
"I would first consider flavor and whether you like it or not," he told science and technology magazine Discover. "Choose the beer you enjoy, for goodness sake."
A temple complex in Turkey that predates even the pyramids is rewriting the story of human evolution.
They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge—the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high—the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt's German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: "Many people think that it changes everything…It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."
Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a "Neolithic revolution" 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the "high" religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.
Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.
The builders of Göbekli Tepe could not write or leave other explanations of their work. Schmidt speculates that nomadic bands from hundreds of miles in every direction were already gathering here for rituals, feasting, and initiation rites before the first stones were cut. The religious purpose of the site is implicit in its size and location. "You don't move 10-ton stones for no reason," Schmidt observes. "Temples like to be on high sites," he adds, waving an arm over the stony, round hilltop. "Sanctuaries like to be away from the mundane world."
Unlike most discoveries from the ancient world, Göbekli Tepe was found intact, the stones upright, the order and artistry of the work plain even to the un-trained eye. Most startling is the elaborate carving found on about half of the 50 pillars Schmidt has unearthed. There are a few abstract symbols, but the site is almost covered in graceful, naturalistic sculptures and bas-reliefs of the animals that were central to the imagination of hunter-gatherers. Wild boar and cattle are depicted, along with totems of power and intelligence, like lions, foxes, and leopards. Many of the biggest pillars are carved with arms, including shoulders, elbows, and jointed fingers. The T shapes appear to be towering humanoids but have no faces, hinting at the worship of ancestors or humanlike deities. "In the Bible it talks about how God created man in his image," says Johns Hopkins archeologist Glenn Schwartz. Göbekli Tepe "is the first time you can see humans with that idea, that they resemble gods."
The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts. A Catholic born in Franconia, Germany, Schmidt wanders the site in a white turban, pointing out the evidence of that transition. "The people here invented agriculture. They were the inventors of cultivated plants, of domestic architecture," he says.
Göbekli sits at the Fertile Crescent's northernmost tip, a productive borderland on the shoulder of forests and within sight of plains. The hill was ideally situated for ancient hunters. Wild gazelles still migrate past twice a year as they did 11 millennia ago, and birds fly overhead in long skeins. Genetic mapping shows that the first domestication of wheat was in this immediate area—perhaps at a mountain visible in the distance—a few centuries after Göbekli's founding. Animal husbandry also began near here—the first domesticated pigs came from the surrounding area in about 8000 B.C., and cattle were domesticated in Turkey before 6500 B.C. Pottery followed. Those discoveries then flowed out to places like Çatalhöyük, the oldest-known Neolithic village, which is 300 miles to the west.
The artists of Göbekli Tepe depicted swarms of what Schmidt calls "scary, nasty" creatures: spiders, scorpions, snakes, triple-fanged monsters, and, most common of all, carrion birds. The single largest carving shows a vulture poised over a headless human. Schmidt theorizes that human corpses were ex-posed here on the hilltop for consumption by birds—what a Tibetan would call a sky burial. Sifting the tons of dirt removed from the site has produced very few human bones, however, perhaps because they were removed to distant homes for ancestor worship. Absence is the source of Schmidt's great theoretical claim. "There are no traces of daily life," he explains. "No fire pits. No trash heaps. There is no water here." Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.
Some archeologists, like Hodder, the Neolithic specialist, wonder if Schmidt has simply missed evidence of a village or if his dating of the site is too precise. But the real reason the ruins at Göbekli remain almost unknown, not yet incorporated in textbooks, is that the evidence is too strong, not too weak. "The problem with this discovery," as Schwartz of Johns Hopkins puts it, "is that it is unique." No other monumental sites from the era have been found. Before Göbekli, humans drew stick figures on cave walls, shaped clay into tiny dolls, and perhaps piled up small stones for shelter or worship. Even after Göbekli, there is little evidence of sophisticated building. Dating of ancient sites is highly contested, but Çatalhöyük is probably about 1,500 years younger than Göbekli, and features no carvings or grand constructions. The walls of Jericho, thought until now to be the oldest monumental construction by man, were probably started more than a thousand years after Göbekli. Huge temples did emerge again—but the next unambiguous example dates from 5,000 years later, in southern Iraq.
The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.
Comments
Unfortunately, the actual article doesn't quite live up to the awesomeness of that title, but I think the headline alone is enough to warrant its inclusion in this thread.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2063-alcohol-impairs-driving-more-than-marijuana.html
Of course, I can only imagine that they would have the same punishments for driving high as driving drunk, which is exactly how it should be.
From a more pragmatic perspective, look at the money flow. Every year we spend millions and millions on cop hours chasing after and processing pot smokers who pose little to no real threat to society; and we spend about $40,000 US a year per person just to imprison these people in a jail system that is oversaturated. The money we spend on cannabis is overwhelming, while the cartels make about 70% of their profits just from this one drug.
But what if we legalized it?
The money we were spending on cannabis related crimes would be instantly freed up, along with the tens of millions we are spending incarcerating people whose only crime is wanting to toke up. Furthermore, we could potentially deal serious damage to the business model and supply chain that the cartels use by simply allowing legitimate private businesses to compete for producers. And much of that money would be taxed and sent right to the government and out of the hands of criminals.
And a point that I just came up with while writing this: Given that cartels make 70% of their profits from cannabis, that means that their pay structures and expenses are already structured around a given level of revenue. Taking away these profits would force them to simultaneously take several steps down in lifestyle while forcing them to drastically raise the prices of their other drugs while they try to restructure their business models. Steep rises in prices of cocaine and heroin would deter usage. Therefore, legalizing cannabis could potentially lead to drops of usage of dangerous drugs far greater than what the war on drugs has done on its own.
Just something to think about.
That being said, you gotta be responsible about it. Just as I know PLENTY of people who get away with drinking every single weekend and still make good grades, I know people who smoke every weekend and make good grades as well. Just set aside a specific time where you don't have to be responsible, understand what you're getting yourself into, and don't let anything get out of hand.
That's another thing about weed. There's nothing physically addicting in it-- the only addiction that comes from pot is psychological addiction. It's not like alcohol or cigarettes. If you really want to stop smoking weed, you should have NO trouble because the only thing that's making you smoke is yourself (along with maybe a little peer pressure).
More information: Nanopool
EDIT: Seriously, this just kind of seems like asbestos all over again.
That being said, it certainly does sound interesting.