Solar Eclipse Good JuJu with Violent Predictions
So apparently the apocalypse begins tomorrow with the Solar Eclipse. Wonder if Gilding’s Emergency Hurrican Kit is equipped for the apocalypse…?
In truth, Indian astrologers are predicting violence and turmoil across the world will result of tomorrows solar eclipse — which the superstitious and religious view as a sign of potential doom.
In Hindu mythology, two demons, Rahu and Ketu, are said to “swallow” the sun during the eclipse, snuffing out its life-giving light and causing food to become inedible and water undrinkable. Wonder what the mythos has to say about the two demons regurgitating the sun?
Pregnant women are advised to stay indoors, preventing impending birth defects, while praying and fasting and ritual bathing, particularly in holy rivers, are encouraged. You know, Gilding read once that India, per capita, has the most birth defects resulting in severe physical mutations (i.e. Cyclops Baby, the Khan Family, Devendra Harne, and the other half a million babies born in India each year with birth defects).
And while families in India are doing every thing they can to have their June 22nd scheduled caesarian’s rescheduled for any day but that day, astrologers are predicting that with this deeply rooted belief in Indian society, there will be a rise in communal and regional violence in the days that follow the eclipse, particularly in India, China and other Southeast Asian nations — where the eclipse will be seen on Wednesday morning. Why does it have to be violence? Think about it, with such a “cataclismic” event in your belief about to happen, why would you want to react to choas with choas? Isn’t that a bit ironic — or would that be moronic?
One astrologer, Raj Kumar Sharma, has even predicted that some sort of terrorist attack and a natural disaster shall result of the eclipse. To be more specific, he predicts that an Indian political leader could be killed, increasing tensions between the West and Iran, escalating into possible US military action after Saturn moves from Leo into Virgo. For the non-astrology following, that’s “what’s your sign” speak for September.
Sharma says, “The last 200 years, whenever Saturn has gone into Virgo there has been either a world war or a mini world war,” he told AFP.
But, while one astrologer warns of evil portent with Wednesday’s upcoming eclipse, Siva Prasad Tata, who runs the Astro Jyoti website, writes that while eclipses, and their subsequent wacky pull on nature, are a natural phenomenon, there is an upside. During the period of the eclipse, the opposite attracting forces are very powerful, and from a spiritual point of view, that makes for good worshipping juju.
Related Article: Yahoo News– Solar eclipse pits superstition against science
Post-traumatic embitterment disorder
Ever had that thought that doctors are either very bored or very greedy? On current debate at the American Psychiatric Association conference is whether or not bitterness is a diagnosable disease. Post-traumatic embitterment disorder, as the new mental health problem will be known, as argued by Dr. Michael Linden, drives people to endless rumination and seething for revenge, which itself isn’t a cure — his opinion, mind you, not Gilding. For Linden, bitterness is a psychiatric problem and requires diagnosis.
Gilding can’t help but feel this is yet one more place the medical professionals are trying to medicate what is a moral belief into something that is tangible and objective and therefore a medicinally treatable problem. As this article agreeably points out, an example of this is the pursuit of homosexuality as a medical “problem”. Just because a person habors what you or society considers an undesirable trait doesn’t mean its a medical problem. And its hard not to see this recent debate as one of two things — hell, probably both — a way of correcting what this doctor sees as an undesirable and/or a way to make profit with (studies, drugs, practice, etc.). As writer Ben Goldacre says, “drug companies with serotonin pills to sell foster a belief that depression is down to serotonin ‑ even though the evidence is contradictory ‑ to a public eager for simple, molecular answers.”
Bitterness just is. Its an undesirable trait, both personally and in others, but its not a medicinal one. Sometimes the tried and true measures of upbringing and learning your lesson are the answer. And while that doesn’t mean we have control over how the other person behaves — as we would with medicinal control — and that often means that we have to deal with people with disdainable personalities and behaviors, that’s all part of being human — so get over it. Really, the need to control everything in life isn’t necessarily a better path, its just more responsibility.
By the way, there was a study done on this. Kevin Carlsmith, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert from Colgate, Virginia and Harvard universities conducted an experiment in which players of a game could earn money for co-operating with fellow players, but a player could earn more money at the expense of their fellow players by turning on them.
With the use of programed computer algorithms to be either very nice or very nasty, several trials were taken in which one of the players would warmly encourage co-operation, but by the end would turn on the fellow player, robbing them of “both reward and piece of mind.”
Some of the students were then offered the opportunity to exact payback — an opportunity to punish the one who ripped them off. For every 5 cents they spent, they were able to confiscate 15 cents from the free-loading backstabber. But, guess what, by the end the students reported that the revenge made them feel no better, in fact, they felt worse afterwards. And isn’t that the old parable, the one we’re taught as children by almost every authority figure we come across — that revenge won’t bring us back what we lost, that it won’t make us feel any better.
There’s no accounting for people who behave disdainably, who go against the moral grain of society, its simply human. Doctors need to get a handle on this — or they could be even more ironic and create a pill that makes them get a handle on this.
See, bristles do come with age
Found within the Inyo National Forest some 10,000-11,000 feet in the White Mountains of Sierra, Nevada, live the oldest known living trees on Earth. The Bristlecone Pine Forest have survived more than 40 centuries,exceeding the age of the oldest Giant Sequoia by 1,500 years. The oldest confirmed age of 4,768 years secured the Birstlecone Pine — Methuselah — as the oldest, for which it is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records.
From seedling to ancient relic, each tree is an individual character — no two are alike. But contrary to what their age would denote, the pines look more like weathered dwarfs than hulking behemouths. They add no more than an inch per century to their girth. The harsh climate conditions and high elevation coupled with poor soil conditions create the recipe for their dwarfy prickliness. Though, these conditions have allowed the trees to be the only ones able to adapt, giving them plenty of breathing room a long and undisturbed life.
And just to put their age into perspective — just in case straight numbers don’t do it for you — the oldest of these trees started growing around the same time as the Great Pyramid of Giza was completed. It was 600 years old when Stone Henge was completed; 800 years old at the beginning of the Bronze Age; 1,100 years old when the Mayan civilization rose in Central America; 1,300 when Moses lead the Hebrews from Egypt to the land of Israel. Most were already 1,400 years old when the ancient Pueblo civilizaton rose in North America, while at the same time, on the other side of the world, the Greeks fought in the Trojan War. By the beginning of the Iron Age they were around 1,800 years old; some had already reached 1,900 years when the city of Rome was founded. They were 2,100 years old when Gautama Buddha achieved enlightenment and founded Buddhism in India, and China’s first emporer built the Great Wall of China; 2,500 years old when Julius Caesar was born; 2,600 years old when Jesus Christ was born; and 3,200 years old when Muhammad founded Islam. King William conquered England when they were 3,760 years old and Christopher Columbus landed in America when they were 4,370 years old. They were almost 4,400 years old when the United States declared independence. And lastly, they had reached the age of 4,450 when California joined the union. [Via flushrush]
Weird Earth
Some totally amazing and totally alien looking places on our very own little Earth.
The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are said to be the most similar place on Earth to Mars. Located within Victoria Land west of McMurdo sound, this region of Antarctica gets almost no snowfall, and with the exception of a few steep rocks, are the only continental part of Antarctica devoid of ice. Lake Vanda, in Wright Valley, is a perennially frozen lake several meters thick. Beneath that lies extremely salty water teeming with simple organisms, a subject of ongoing research. Less desirable in the perfect coctail icecube, but that threaded patterning in the ice lake is stunning. Via Oddee via Dark Roasted Blend.
The plantlife on this island resemble an intersting mix of Disneyland fairytale proportions gone organic and beyond lifesize slime molds. That slime molds link, by the way, takes you to some awesome photographs of slime molds — micro mushrooms.
Socotra Island, located in the Indian Ocean, is a part of a group of four islands that has been geographically isolated from the mainland Africa for some 6 or 7 million years. Like the Galapagos Islands, Socotra is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic.
Some of the trees and plants on this island, preserved through the long geological isolation, date back as old as 20 million years. Via Oddee via Sinlung.
Lastly, the Rio Tinto in Spain. It is the giant opencast mines of the Rio Tinto that create its surreal, Mars-like landscape. The rmoval of layer upon layer of soil and rock in search of iron ore, copper, silver, and a host of other mineral ores, has tinted this part of the world in hues of dusty pink, brown, yellow, red, and grey. The sheer magnitude of the mining has created depressions that resemble a man-made crater that measures several kilometers across.
The terraced rocks are streaked with unusual colors of mineral ores, creating the impression of a natural amphitheater.
But the Rio Tinto is more than an isolated cavity on the Earth’s surface. Its growth has concumed not only mountains and valleys but entire villages, whose populations had to be resettled in specially built towns nearby. Named for the river that flows through the region itself — which was named for the reddish streaks of color that permeates its waters — the unearthed minerals give the soil and waters of the region odd, otherworldly shades of blue, green, yellow, red and brown, making the Rio Tinto a landscape within a landscape. Via Oddee via andalucia.com.
Ghost Peaks
Photo by ph. Oh Jung Seok for Vogue Girl Korea, December 2005
A mountain range never before seen by humans, yet in 1958, Soviet geophysicist Grigoriy A. Gamburtsev discovered the subglacial mountain range during the 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition. Since then scientists have been in the business of “seeing” the mountain range, nicknamed “ghost peaks” but actually named after the Gamburtsev for discovering them. In October 2008 geologists and researchers decided to attemtp to map the mountains using radar, among other methods.
Matching the size of the Alps in scale, the Gamburtsevs lay covered by up to 4km of ice. Geologists struggle to understand just how such a massif could have formed and persisted in the middle of the Antarctic. Late last year an interntaional team comprised of scientists, engineers, pilots and support staff from the UK, the US, germany, Australia, China, and Japan, set out on a deep-field survey get some answers.
The mountain range is an enigma in several facets. Other than its obvious curiousity of existing in the Antarctic, and being burried under miles of ice, the range sits in the middle of the continent, a peculiarity as most mountain ranges are on the edges of continents. Furthermore, the mountains don’t seem to have been created in either of the two conventional ways in which mountains are created: 1) collision of continents, though the last collision was 500 million plus years ago; 2) a hotspot, where volcanoes punch through the crust much like in Hawaii, but there’s no evidence that underneath the ice sheet the temperatures are hot enough. So the current theory is that the mountains are a nucleation point for the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet. It is thought that as the Earth’s climate cooled just over 30 million years ago, the snoes that fell on the mountains produced mighty glaciers, which then merged to form one giant spreading ice-mass.
More information on the mountains and the current expedition that is underway can be found in this article, at the British Antarctic Survey site, and the Antatrtica’s Gamburtsev Province site.
Zombie Fire Ants
“Oh No! Giant Fire Ant!” by 8 Skeins of Danger on flickr
Yay for Zombie Ants!
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Services are giving their hand a try at encouraging this zombie ant phenomenon in order to control those pesky fire ants population.
Native to a region of South America where the fire ants in Texas originated, researchers have learned that there are as many as 23 phorid species along with pathogens that attack fire ants to keep their population and movements under control. Researchers also say that this is a natural evolution — Mother Nature’s way of keeping the eco-system in balance — and therefore not going to completely wipe out the fire ant. As one researchers note, the fire ants are “very aware” of the tiny flies that wreak zombie havoc on their colony, so it only takes a few of these to cause the ants to modify their behavior. Just one or two of the flies is all it takes to control the fire ants movement or above-ground activities. Think of it as putting a castle under seige.
Which is, actually a really good analogy for what occurs. See, zombie ants are made like this:
The flies (previously mentioned as “phorids”) dive-bomb the fire ants and lay eggs. The maggot that hatches inside the ant eats away at the brain (mmmm…brains), and the ant starts exhibiting what is described as zombie-like behavior. At some point the ant just gets up and starts to wander away aimlessly from the mound. This wandering stage goes on for about two weeks.
About a month after the egg is laid, the ant’s head falls off and the fly emerges ready to attack any foraging ants away from the mound to then lay their own eggs.
Researchers in Texas began introducing some of these phorid species in Texas in 1999, the first species of which has traveled all the way from Central and South Texas to the Oklahoma border. This year UT researchers will introduce a fourth species in Texas at farms and ranches from Stephenville to Overton.
Fire ants cost the Texas economy nearly $1 billion in damages annually by damaging circuit breakers and other electrical equipment according to a Texas A&M study. They have also been known to attack young calves.
Consider this an eco- pest control act. Sounds harsh — though you have to admit, zombie ants…that’s pretty awesome — but researchers insist that the flies do not attack native ants or species and have been introduced to other Gulf Coast states. The impact these flies have on the fire ant are slow acting and is a cumulative impact measured across time, not a nuclear bomb impact.
Source: Yahoo News
Penny Pinching
The above was said by Ernest Rutherford, born on 30 August 1871 in Nelson, New Zealand. The son of a farmer, in 1894 he won a scholarship to Cambridge University and worked as a research student under Sir Joseph Thomson. In 1898 he became Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. There, working with chemist Frederick Soddy, he investigated the newly-discovered phenomenon of radioactivity. Rutherford and Soddy proposed that radioactivity results from the disintegration of atoms.
In 1907 Rutherford returned to England to become Professor of Physics at Manchester University. In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1914 he was knighted, but the war interrupted his work. He helped to develop methods of dealing with the new menace of submarine warfare, as well as studying underwater acoustics.
In 1917 he returned to physics and a long series of experiments in which he discovered that the nuclei of certain light elements, such as nitrogen, could be ‘disintegrated’ by the impact of energetic alpha particles coming from some radioactive source, and that during this process fast protons were emitted. This was the first artificially induced nuclear reaction. Rutherford had virtually created a new discipline, the nuclear physics.
In 1919 Rutherford became professor of experimental physics and director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, succeeding Thomson. Many of his students at the Cavendish Laboratory went on to become pioneering scientists. From 1925 to 1930 he was president of the Royal Society (to which he had been elected in 1903). In 1931 he was awarded a life peerage and died on 19 October 1937. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. (Source)
She Blinded Me with Science
ph. Tony Duran
Enuice Aphroditois is an aquatic predatory polychaete worm dwelling at the ocean floor at depths of approximately 10-40 meters. And though the worm hunts for its food, it is omnivorous.
But this hunter worm has an even more ferocious reputation, for which it has received the affectionate pet-name, the Bobbit worm. This is because the Bobbit worm will attack her male lover’s penis and feed it to her young after mating…
That’s one way to be sure you’re child doesn’t have any bastard siblings.
Curiouser and Curiouser
Oooo…looky! at this beautiful Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson, Library of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. Gilding wants one just like it when she grows up.
This lavish Cabinet of Curiousities is tucked away in the back of a flourescent-lit modern labrary attached to the Museum of Natural History in the Jardin des Plantes.
Dating bak to 1735, this luxurious cabinet is a unique manifestation of aesthetic and science, amassing an exhibit, thanks to the family fortune, that has the rare quality of the atmospheric mise-en-scène of the preceding Wunderkammern with the organizational intent of later cabinets…or so the experts of in a 2005 issue of Cabinet Magazine says. In any case, what’s produced is an amazing blend of system and fantasy. COnsidered to be the most imaginative of the French cabinets of the 18th century, this curiosity cabinet was housed in the hôtel particulier of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson (1702-1744). (Source)
Via: Morbid Anatomy
A Clinical Study of Pornography
[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…
J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).
And then you have Wim Delvoye. (Remember, Delvoye’s Gothic Amalgamation of Familiar Icons was one of Gilding’s favorites.)
Delvoye’s series, SexRays, takes pornography to a level of science many, including the author of this article, find disturbing. Is it the sex, is it the clinical, autopsy-like connection? Gilding, however, finds it pretty fucking (teehee) cool — no surprise there.
Delvoye convinced
friends to paint
themselves with barium
(the liquid chemical
element used as an
X-ray radiocontrast agent for imaging the human gastrointestinal tract) and then be ‘photographed’ using X-Ray machines having sex. Simple idea, complex images.
Link: Wim Delvoye | SexRays
Via: Ballardian
Lover’s Embrace
In 2003, archeologists in Italy unearthed two skeletons thought to be 5,000 to 6,000 years old. The discovery was made just outside of Mantua, about 25 miles south of Verona.
The pair, most certainly a man and a woman, are thought to have died young, as it indicative by the state of their teeth, most of which are intact.
What makes this discovery so unique — “something special” — is that never before had a double burial been found in the Neolithic period, much less two people held in an embrace — “…and they really are hugging,” said Elena Menotti, chief archeologist.
Link: BBC News
Mother Nature’s Duh! Factor
Mother Nature couldn’t have made Nutrition any more of a Duh! factor than this. And still we can’t seem to get nutrition right. Perhaps, had they taught nutrition this way in grade school along with that ridiculous Food Pyramid, nutrition wouldn’t be such a mystery to children. Granted, a child will most probably go for a pixie stick before celery stick of given the moment for naughty without consequence (well consequences known and understood to them) but Gilding has a theory that nutrition is probably just as confusing as hell for the parent trying to promote healthy eating. Certainly, corporate conglomerate America doesn’t help matters with its hand-basket to hell filled with temptations and pre-packaged foods. And lets not even get into the lack of time the American parent has to cook let alone plan a healthy meal. But perhaps knowing Mother Nature’s little hints will help.
A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye…and YES science now shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.
A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart is red and has four chambers. All of the research shows tomatoes are indeed pure heart and blood food.
Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.
A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex. We now know that walnuts help develop over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.
Kidney beans heal and help maintain kidney function, and they look exactly like the human kidneys.
Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb, and the like look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. As the bones are 23% comprised of sodium so are these foods, replenishing the skeletal needs of the body so that the much needed sodium is not pulled from the bones, subsequently weakening them.
Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the mobility of sperm and increase their numbers, overcoming male sterility.
Olives assist the helath and function of the ovaries.
Grapefruits, oranges, and other citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and assist in the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.
Onions look like body cells and today’s research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body’s forms of cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes.
Eggplant, Avocadoes, and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix. They also look just like these organs. Research shows that a diet of one avocado a week balances a woman’s hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. Interesting todbit: it takes exactly 9 months to grow and avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. Also, there are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each of these foods, 
though modern science has only studied and named 141 of them.
Sweet potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.
Link: Eons
Catching the Common Fat Ass
Researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, LA., have linked obesity to a highly infectious virus which also causes sniffles and sore throats. The sneaker little bugger, known as AD-36 infects the lungs then makes it way around the body, forcing fat cells to multiply while hiding behind the common sore throat. So essentially, obesity can be “caught” as easily as the common cold from the nasty, germ-spreading people around you.
According to associate professor Nikhil Dhurandhar at Pennington, the virus insinuates itself into the fat cells, replicating itself and in the process increases the number of new fat cells, which may explain why the fat tissue expands, along with our asses.
A third of people tested had the rare and highly contagious virus compared to just 11% of thinner people. And like any virus, until resistance to the bug has been built up within the immune system weight gain can last three months. Evidence in tests on mice and chickens shows the bug could cause already overweight people to gain weight.
Unfortunately though, Dhurandhar makes note that there are other pesky reasons other than viral infections for obesity so its pointless for fat people to try to avoid infection. So while you’re shoving that umpteenth ladel size spoonful of ice cream in your mouth you can’t blame it all on AD-36. Damnit!
Link:
Blind and Seeing
After two consecutive strokes left patient TN, in his 50′s, clinically blind from injury to each hemisphere of his visual cortex, researches became intrigued with him when they discovered during TN’s recovery that despite his blindness, he had maintained the ability to detect emotion on a person’s face. TN responded appropriately to a variety of facial expressions of fear, joy, anger; activity in his amygdala — the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions — confirmed the curious results.
Researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands took their experiments one step further, placing TN in an obstacle course: chairs, boxes, and other various objects were placed down a long hallway and TN was set loose to walk the deathtrap of a corridor unassisted. Astonishingly, TN negotiated the “course” perfectly, never once colliding into any of the possible obstacles.
TN’s rare condition is known as blindsight. Because the strokes damaged only the visual cortex, his eyes remain functional, still registering information it gathers from his environment. He simply lacks the visual cortex to process and interpret it, making TN’s brain register sight not as a conscious but subconscious experience. Though he no longer has a definitive picture of his surroundings, TN retains an innate awareness of his position in the world; seeing without being aware that he is seeing.
Link: SEED– Seeing in the Dark
Above photo from the play “thirty seven isolated events” by paige starling sorvillo at the CounterPULSE Theater. Photo by Ian Winters.
Estonian Wonderland
Some pretty wicked images of a small town in Estonia after a storm.
Via: English Russia
