Blog of Parag

Moon on Feb 24th, 2004

Enlarged smaller area with craters and a mountain range at the edge of light and darkness.

Pleiades (M45)

Beautiful star cluster Pleiades (M45), enlarged through the telescope...

First time...

Bush Backs Amendment Banning Gay Marriage

All 27 amendments to the US constitution, were made to increase the freedom and rights enjoyed by US citizens. If this madness goes through the process, this will be the first time when an amendament will limit rights of its citizens. The history of USA is full of struggles to remove all forms of discimination to provide equal rights for all. This will go against all that and be discriminatory towards gays and lesbians.

Moon and Venus

Moon and Venus from last night.

A bit of color

Changed stylesheet of the blog. Added a bit of color to my original boring grey color-scheme.

Halliburton criminal probe

Finally a step in the right direction.

Pentagon opens Halliburton criminal probe

After not only allegations, but, Halliburton accepted overcharging in at least two cases and returned money to the government.

Related posts:
Not just oil...
That's it???

National guard, College education, etc.

Other than the fact that they belong to the republican party, former vice president, Dan Quayle has quite a few things in common with the current president.

Both Mr. Quayle and Mr. Bush were in the National Guard during the Vietnam war. Both were accused of using influence to get into the National Guard rather than active military. Mr. Quayle denied the use of influence, but, unlike Mr. Bush, he was forthright about the reasons for getting into the National Guard.

"Obviously, if you join the National Guard, you have less of a chance of going to Vietnam," he (Dan Quayle) said on "Meet the Press" some time later. "I mean, it goes without saying."

In the current controversy about George W's military record, it is taken for granted that he used his father's political influence to get ahead of a 500-man waiting list to get into the National Guard. But, he makes a big deal about how it was as important to serve in the National Guard as in the active military and how he fulfilled (or not) his requirements in Texas and Alabama.

General Colin Powell wrote in his book "My American Journey":

The policies--determining who would be drafted and who would be deferred, who would serve and who would escape, who would die and who would live--were an antidemocratic disgrace. I can never forgive a leadership that said, in effect: These young men--poorer, less educated, less privileged--are expendable (someone described them as "economic cannon fodder"), but the rest are too good to risk. I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes (who were probably healthier than any of us) managed to wrangle spots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.

During his political life, Mr. Quayle suffered through much ridicule about his spelling abilities and hence, his perceived intelligence. Similar questions about Mr. Bush's intelligence and language skills have been raised since he started his run for the White House. If one looks at the academic records, Mr. Quayle had a C+ average, better than Mr. Bush's straight C average. Surprisingly, vice president Mr. Cheney, who seems so smart and intelligent flunked out of Yale twice.

Information in this post is taken from Calvin Trillin's Op-Ed in The New York Times.
Op-Ed Contributor: Quayle, Reconsidered

Superbowl hypocrisy

Comments heard at the lunch table today:

• Total area of Janet Jackson's body covered by clothing during the Superbowl halftime show was more than twice of the cheerladers.


• Why do certain US lawmakers object to mullahs ordering women to wear burkas, when they can't stand the sight of human flesh themselves?


• Why is it OK to show mangled dead bodies in the evening news or the gruesome things they do in 'Fear Factor', and Superbowl halftime show was deemed obscene?

A look at the past

Hubble and Keck Team Up to Find Farthest Known Galaxy in Universe

An international team of scientists discovered this primeval galaxy located at a distance of about 13 billion light years. That means we are looking at how this galaxy was 13 billion years ago when this light that we are seeing left for its journey towards earth.

This amazing observation was made possible by a dense group of galaxies called Abell 2218, which is about 2 billion light years away. Its gravitational field is so intense that it acts like a lens and bends and magnifies light coming from distant and faint objects behind it that we would not be able to see otherwise.

Different colored arcs in the picture are star forming galaxies with different red-shifts caused by their distances. The red fringes showed by the outlines is the image of this farthest galaxy with the most ever recorded red-shift of 7. That puts its distance at 13 billion light years. This research has allowed astrophysicists to make a more accurate estimate of the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, rather than the earlier estimate of 12-15 billion years.

One boob uncovers many....

Frank Rich writes in The New York TImes about his hero Janet Jackson. The whole article is really worth reading. The main theme of it is...

By baring a single breast in a slam-dunk publicity stunt of two seconds' duration, this singer also exposed just how many boobs we have in this country. We owe her thanks for a genuine public service.

The outrage expressed by conservative groups sounds completely empty, without substance. There are far more vulgar, violent and obscene things on TV already. They shouldn't need to wait for this incident to throw their TV sets out if they are really so much worried about what their children watch.

If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation's families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to "Little Women." As Laura Bush put it, "Parents wouldn't know to turn their television off before that happened." They wouldn't? In the two-plus hours "before that happened," parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set? Apparently nothing short of a simulated rape would do.

It is preposterous to suppose that NFL is anything but sex and violence when you can see almost naked cheerleaders and players hitting each other to injure their opponents in every game. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy watching football on the TV. But, I accept it as what it is rather than labeling it "wholesome program for kids".

Taking a clue from Janet, see what an icon in child entertainment has done to get instatnt publicity. ;)

Click on the link below to read the complete article by Frank Rich:

FRANK RICH
My Hero, Janet Jackson

Published: February 15, 2004

t may be a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Two weeks after the bustier bust, almost no one has come to the defense of Janet Jackson. I do so with a full heart. By baring a single breast in a slam-dunk publicity stunt of two seconds' duration, this singer also exposed just how many boobs we have in this country. We owe her thanks for a genuine public service.

You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy. She was out to accomplish a naked agenda — the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album's release — and so she did. She's not faking much remorse, either. Last Sunday she refused to appear on the Grammys rather than accede to CBS's demand that she perform a disingenuous, misty-eyed ritual "apology" to the nation for her crime of a week earlier. By contrast, Justin Timberlake, the wimp who gave the English language the lasting gift of "wardrobe malfunction," did as he was told, a would-be pop rebel in a jacket and a tie, looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal's office. Ms. Jackson, one suspects, is laughing all the way to the bank.

There are plenty of Americans to laugh at, starting with the public itself. If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation's families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to "Little Women." As Laura Bush put it, "Parents wouldn't know to turn their television off before that happened." They wouldn't? In the two-plus hours "before that happened," parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set? Apparently nothing short of a simulated rape would do.

Once the deed was done, the audience couldn't stop watching it. TV viewers with TiVo set an instant-replay record as they slowed down the offending imagery with a clinical alacrity heretofore reserved for the Zapruder film. Lycos, the Internet search engine, reported that the number of searches for Janet Jackson tied the record set by 9/11-related searches on and just after 9/11.

"That a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief," wrote Aaron Schatz, the columnist on the Lycos Top 50 site. (Though not, perhaps, to the fundamentalist zealots who attacked us.)

For those who still couldn't get enough, the cable news channels giddily played the video over and over to remind us of just how deplorable it was. Even though by this point the networks were blurring the breast with electronic pasties, there was still an erotic kick to be milked: the act of a man tearing off a woman's clothes was as thrilling to the audience as whatever flesh was revealed therein, perhaps more so. But to say that aloud is to travel down a road that our moral watchdogs do not want to take. It's the unwritten rule of our culture that the public is always right. The "folks," as Bill O'Reilly is fond of condescending to them, are always the innocent victims of the big, bad cultural villains. They're never complicit in the crime. The idea that the folks might have the free will to tune out tasteless TV programming or do without TV altogether — or that they might eat up the sleaze, with or without young 'uns in the room — is almost never stated on television, for obvious reasons of fiscal self-interest. You don't insult your customers.

Since the public is blameless for its role in creating a market for displays like the Super Bowl's, who should be the scapegoat instead? If you peruse Mr. O'Reilly's admonitions in his first three programs dealing with the topic, or the tirades of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing direct-mail mills like the Parents Television Council and Concerned Women for America, you'll find a revealing pattern: MTV, CBS and their parent corporation, Viacom, are the exclusive targets of the invective. The National Football League is barely mentioned, if at all. To blame the country's highest-rated sports operation, after all, might risk insulting the football-watching folks to whom these moral watchdogs pander for fun and profit.

But the N.F.L. is in the sex business as assiduously as CBS and MTV, and for the same reason: it wants those prurient eyeballs. It's now been more than a quarter-century since Super Bowl X, when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders first caught the attention of the nation. "The audience deserves a little sex with its violence," Chuck Milton, a CBS sports producer, said back then.

The N.F.L. has since worked tirelessly to fill that need. This year was not the first MTV halftime show that the league has ordered to try to expand its aging audience beyond the Levitra demographic. The first such collaboration, Super Bowl XXXV three years ago, featured Britney Spears all but falling out of a halter top and numbers in which both Mr. Timberlake (then appearing with 'NSync) and Nelly grabbed their crotches. There was, to my eye, twice as much crotch-grabbing then as there was this year, but that show generated no outrage whatsoever.

It did, however, attract two million more viewers than the game itself. The N.F.L. wanted more of the same for 2004, which is why the league's commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, released a statement saying, "We're pleased to work again with MTV" when announcing the encore. Or pleased up to a point. When MTV proposed that part of the show be devoted to a performance of the song "An American Prayer" by Bono to increase awareness of the horrific AIDS epidemic in Africa, the N.F.L. said no — even though Bono had done the league the favor of giving the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show a dignified musical tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The mention of a sexually transmitted disease might dampen the libido of the salacious MTV show that the N.F.L. wanted this year and wanted so badly that the league remained silent even when MTV's pregame publicity promised that the performance would contain "some shocking moments." As one participant in the production told me, the N.F.L. saw "every camera angle" at the show's rehearsals and thus was no less aware of its general tone than CBS and MTV were. You don't hire Ms. Jackson, who's been steadily exposing more of her breasts for over a decade on magazine covers, to sing "Rock Your Body" if you have a G-rated game plan. Nonetheless, Joe Browne, the league's flak, pleaded total innocence after the event, releasing a hilarious statement that the N.F.L., like the public, was the unwitting victim of a show that it had both commissioned and helped supervise: "We applaud the F.C.C.'s investigation into the MTV-produced halftime. We and our fans were embarrassed by the entire show."

That investigation, piggybacked by last week's Congressional hearings, is an election-year stunt as full of hot air as the Bud Light horse flatulence ad. "Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration," declared Michael Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, upon announcing that the entire halftime would be examined. A celebration of what, exactly? Didn't Mr. Powell, the nation's chief television regulator, watch the previous MTV halftime show?

He promises to conduct the investigation himself — a meaningless gesture, though it may gain him an audience and perhaps a photo op with Ms. Jackson. Mr. Powell's real agenda here is to conduct a show trial that might counter his well-earned reputation as a wholly owned subsidiary of our media giants. Viacom has been a particularly happy beneficiary of the deregulatory push of his reign, buying up every slice of the media pie that's not nailed down. Should CBS be found guilty of "indecency" by the feds, the total penalty would amount to some $5 million, roughly the price of two 30-second Super Bowl commercials. Congress's new push to increase those fines tenfold is just as laughable. Viacom took in $26.6 billion last year.

Not for nothing did the company's stock actually go up the day after the Super Bowl. The halftime show was great merchandising for both MTV and CBS, the go-to network for "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show." Not to be left without a piece of the action, even NBC got into the act. Citing the Jackson flap, it decreed that two split-second shots of an 80-year-old woman's breast in an emergency room sequence in "E.R." be excised. But the "E.R." star Noah Wyle then went on NBC's "Today" show the morning of the broadcast to joke about the decision, and the network-owned NBC affiliate in New York used the banned breast as a promo for its post-"E.R." news broadcast: "What you won't see on tonight's episode of `E.R.' — at 11!" Thus did NBC successfully transform its decision not to bare geriatric flesh into a sexual tease to hype ratings. This is true marketing genius, American-style.

What's next? Some are predicting that all the tape delays being injected into TV events to pre-empt future wardrobe malfunctions will be the death of spontaneous, live TV. But the moment an awards show takes a ratings hit, this new electronic prophylactic will be quietly abandoned by the networks even faster than the N.F.L.'s vague threat not to collaborate with MTV next year.

Ms. Jackson, the biggest winner in this whole escapade, is already back on the air. Her official rehabilitation began right after the Super Bowl, when BET started broadcasting a 10-part series of "special Black History Month" spots in which she profiles historical luminaries like Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.

"Her tone is serious and focused, with the air and diction of a seasoned lecturer," says the network's news release, which also notes that "the spots feature Ms. Jackson clad in classic black." Wasn't her Super Bowl dominatrix costume classic black as well? Well, never underestimate the power of synergy. BET is another wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom.

Valentines

Some really nice valentines copied from Charukeshi's blog.

US exports trash to India

Exporting Coke, Pepsi, Pizzza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken to India wasn't good enough. Now, US exports its trash to India.

Thousands flock to Benny Hinn meetings in Mumbai

New Windows release later this year!

Now that Windows code up for grabs on the internet, and in the hands of OS developers worldwide, we can expect a good version of Windows distributed freely later this year. Or maybe, they'll find out that the code is crappy and nothing good could be learnt from it.

Evolution is safe in Georgia

Yahoo! News - Ga. Science Teachers to Keep Evolution

Followup to my earlier post.

State schools superitendent, Kathy Cox, called a group of teachers to work out the revision proposal for school curriculum. This group of science teachers decided to keep evolution in Georgia's science curriculum.

"We're empowering the teachers of Georgia to teach science as it should be taught," said Stephen Pruitt, the state's science curriculum specialist. "No teacher will have to stand in front of the Board of Education or anybody else and have to defend why they are teaching evolution."

Fortunately, sanity prevails at least for the time being.

I have painted the US map red

I have lived in, visited, travelled through 40 out of 50 states. i.e. 80% of USA. Have to work at getting 100% ceverage.

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

200 days to fix a broken Windows

It seems like Microsoft doesn't really care about Windows security. It took them 200 days to release a patch for a major security problem in Windows. Two years ago, Microsoft started the 'Trustworthy Computing Initiative, making security the top priority of the company.

"If it really took them that long technically to make (and test) the fix, then they have other problems," Maiffret, chief hacking officer for security research firm eEye Digital Security said. "That's not a way to run a software company."
...
eEye notified Microsoft of the issue July 25 and of a second, similar issue on Sept. 25. The software giant didn't release a fix for either problem until this week, 200 days after the first flaw was found.

Anti-Valentine

This year, ask some one to be your anti-valentine. If you are sick and tired of this Hallmark occasion, show it with style. Send an anti-valentine from this website. They have several designs, but I liked this one the best.

Therapeutic cloning advances

Scientists clone 30 human embryos

A great breakthrough in the area of therapeutic cloning. This was the first instance where cloned human embryos were grown to a stage where stem cells of three different were produced and harvested. These cells were implanted into mice and were seen to differentiate into more specific cells types.

The aim of this study was to see how embryonic stem cells can be used to make transplantable tissues to treat diseases such as Pakinson's, diabetes, and osteoarthritis. This was not an attempt to make cloned babies.

The researchers went through rigorous review with the ethical board in South Korea and obtained consent from the women who donated eggs used in the study.

According to Roger Pedersen, professor of regenerative medicine, at the University of Cambridge, UK:

"The present work has substantially advanced the cause of generating transplantable tissues that exactly match the patient's own immune system.

"These researchers' findings also make it possible to learn how to reprogramme the human genome to an embryonic state.

"This will likely accelerate the development of alternative ways of reprogramming human cells, which could in the future diminish the need to use human eggs for this purpose."

UPDATE: A more detailed article describing the research appeared in the New York Times. Read it here...

Cloning Creates Human Embryos

February 12, 2004
By GINA KOLATA

Scientists in South Korea report that they have created
human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem
cells, the universal cells that hold great promise for
medical research.

Their goal, the scientists say, is not to clone humans but
to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of
disease.

But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more
feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite the
fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.

The work was led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong
Moon of Seoul National University and will be published
tomorrow in the journal Science. The paper provides a
detailed description of how to create human embryos by
cloning. Experts in the field not involved with the work
said they found the paper persuasive.

"You now have the cookbook, you have a methodology that's
publicly available," said Dr. Robert Lanza, medical
director of a company, Advanced Cell Technology in
Worcester, Mass., that had tried without success to do what
the South Koreans did.

Although the paper, written in dense jargon and summarizing
its findings by saying, "We report the derivation of a
pluripotent embryonic stem cell line (SCNT-hES-1) from a
cloned human blastocyst," its import was immediately clear
to researchers.

"My reaction is, basically, wow," said Dr. Richard Rawlins,
an embryologist who is director of the assisted
reproduction laboratories at the Rush University Medical
Center in Chicago. "It's a landmark paper."

It is what patients with diseases like Parkinson's and
diabetes had been waiting for, the start of so-called
therapeutic cloning. The idea is to clone a patients cells
to make embryonic stem cells that are an exact genetic
match of the patient. Then those cells, patients hope,
could be turned into replacement tissue to treat or cure
their disease without provoking rejection from the body's
immune system.

Even though the new work clears a significant hurdle,
scientists caution that it could take years of further
research before stem cell science turns into actual
therapies.

Even before the publication - reported last night by a
South Korean newspaper, one day ahead of the embargo
imposed by Science - the research was criticized by cloning
opponents.

Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on
Bioethics, called for federal legislation to stop human
cloning for any purpose.

"The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today,
cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned
blastocysts for babymaking," Dr. Kass wrote in an e-mail
message. "In my opinion, and that of the majority of the
Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here
is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium
on all human cloning."

The House has twice passed legislation that would ban all
human cloning experiments, most recently in February 2003.
But the bills have foundered in the Senate, where many
members who oppose reproductive cloning do not want to ban
it for medical research.

Dr. Hwang said he knew that the work would elicit strong
responses but that the research was so important it should
be done anyway, adding that there was strict oversight by
an ethics committee.

"Of course," he said, "we acknowledge that there will be
controversy. But as scientists, we think it is our
obligation to do this."

The paper describes the successful process in detail, with
precise information on how to start the embryos growing and
what solutions are best to nourish them. That recipe
appears to advance the likelihood of reproductive cloning.
When fertility laboratories fertilize eggs, grow embryos to
the same developmental stage as the embryo clones and
implant them in a human uterus, 40 to 60 percent end up as
babies.

The scientists stress that all the research was in the
laboratory, in petri dishes. No embryo was implanted in a
woman. The women who provided unfertilized eggs that were
needed to start the cloning process were not paid.

The research was financed by the government of South Korea,
where cloning to create a baby is illegal.

Dr. Hwang is an expert in animal cloning, and Dr. Moon is a
medical doctor who trained in the late 1980's at a leading
American fertility center, the Jones Institute for
Reproductive Medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical
School in Norfolk. That is one of the very few places where
researchers have extracted human stem cells from embryos
that were made the usual way, by using sperm to fertilize
eggs.

Until now, no one had even come close to using cloning to
create a human embryo or even a monkey embryo, to say
nothing of extracting stem cells from one.

Stem cells are the research prize. They appear after an
embryo has grown for five or six days, its cells
subdividing within the hard casing of the egg. Although the
embryo at this stage contains about 100 cells, it is still
no bigger than the original egg, nearly invisible to the
naked eye.

"If it was floating in water with light underneath, it
might look like a speck of dust," said Dr. William Gibbons,
a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern
Virginia.

The defining feature of a blastocyst is that it has a real
structure, made of a ball of cells, the inner cell mass,
encased in a sphere. The sphere becomes the placenta if the
blastocyst is implanted in a woman's uterus, and the inner
cell mass becomes the fetus.

But at the blastocyst stage, the inner cell mass consists
of cells that are still indeterminate, not yet committed to
becoming any particular cell type. They are the stem cells,
which can in theory develop into any of the body's tissues
and organs. Stem cells from a clone would be genetically
identical to the person who contributed cells to make the
embryo.

Some scientists want to use stem cells to study how genes
cause disease. Others say they may one day use stem cells
to grow replacement tissues that are identical to the
patient's own cells.

But while most expected that cloning would one day be used
to create human embryos for harvesting stem cells, the
South Korean research elicited amazement from experienced
investigators.

They were particularly surprised that the researchers had
managed to assemble so many unfertilized human eggs, 242 in
all.

Advanced Cell Technology, the lone American company that
has tried to conduct similar research, went through a long
and arduous debate with its ethics board before recruiting
young women to donate eggs. The board eventually decided
that a fair payment for a woman's time and effort would be
$4,000.

To donate eggs, women have to inject themselves with
hormones to stimulate their ovaries, be monitored with
ultrasound to see when the eggs are ready to emerge from
the ovaries and then allow doctors to extract the eggs with
a thin needle. Advanced Cell Technology advertised for
donors and paid them the fee, but ended up with just 19
eggs. The company restarted its program in June, Dr. Lanza
said, with "just a few donors.".

In South Korea, Dr. Moon said in a telephone interview,
there was no advertising for egg donors and no payments.
The 16 women who donated the 242 eggs were "personal
contacts," he said, declining to elaborate.

The Koreans are to discuss their findings today in Seattle,
at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.

The investigators selected 176 eggs that were in a
developmental stage that made success seem most likely. To
start the cloning, the team removed the genetic material
from the eggs and replaced it with genetic material
obtained from cumulus cells, the adult cells that cling to
eggs. Cloning experiments with mice had indicated that the
cells were especially amenable to the process.

Dr. Moon explained, "The cumulus cell is easy to get,"
because it is on the surface of the egg.

The abundance of eggs enabled the scientists to experiment
with ways of having the egg cells start to divide and of
growing the embryos in the laboratory.

"They had an incredible amount of eggs and an opportunity
to perfect the protocols," said Dr. Jose B. Cibelli,
formerly with Advanced Cell Technology and now a professor
of animal biotechnology at Michigan State University. "They
tried 14 different protocols."

Dr. Cibelli consulted with the Koreans toward the end of
their work and is listed with them as an author of the
paper in Science.

The researchers experimented with different timing, between
adding the cumulus cell to an egg and activating the egg,
making it start to divide with its cumulus cell genes.

"If they waited four hours instead of two hours, it didn't
work," Dr. Hans Schöler, a professor of reproductive
medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

All along the way, Dr. Schöler added, such small variations
in the procedure had marked effects.

"Marginal differences made it work," he said. "If you
stepped a little bit to the right or a little bit to the
left, it didn't work."

The resulting method yielded blastocysts 26 percent of the
time. "That's amazing," Dr. Schöler said.

Eventually, Dr. Hwang, Dr. Moon and their colleagues ended
up with 30 blastocysts, from which they were able to
extract 20 inner cell masses. One grew into a line of stem
cells.

The next step, Dr. Schöler said, will be to improve the
success rate of obtaining stem cell lines from blastocysts.

Dr. Ron McKay, a stem cell scientist at the National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said the
work suggested that it might be easier than anyone thought
to make cloned human embryos and extract stem cells from
them.

"The next question takes you to the heart of the whole
discussion," Dr. McKay said. "Why do it anyway? What's the
point? Is there any point?"

Dr. McKay said that for him the point was that such cells
could provide a unique opportunity to study human disease.
He spoke of a scientist who had died in her 40's from
breast cancer. What if her cells had been cloned to make
embryonic stem cells and those cells had been directed to
turn into breast tissue? That might give scientists a
chance to examine how genes for breast cancer altered the
cells' susceptibility and might explain how and why the
cancer developed in the first place.

Dr. McKay said learning to make embryo clones for research
could help people who want to make babies that are clones.
But he added that scientists did not always do everything
that is possible.

"I really don't want to comment on the slippery slope," he
said.

Dr. Cibelli, too, focused on the Koreans' report.

"Now you have the demonstration that everyone was waiting
for," he said. "Whether this approach will be applicable to
making babies, I don't know. And I hope I never find out."

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to retire

Yahoo! News - 'CtrlAltDelete' Inventor Restarts Career

Thanks to David Bradley, all of us could perform the three-finger-salute every time we saw the famous 'Blue Screen of Death' and started the process of putting together all the lost of work. It took David 5 minutes to write the code for this command and little did he know that he would be famous for it.

The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to restart the computer should it fail. Bradley wrote the code to make it work.

"I didn't know it was going to be a cultural icon," Bradley said. "I did a lot of other things than CtrlAltDelete, but I'm famous for that one."

I wish him a great retirement and hope he gets to enjoy life after more than 28 years at IBM. This story just cracks me up every time I hear it...

At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys.

"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Bradley said.

Gates didn't laugh. The key combination also is used when software, such as Microsoft's Windows operating system, fails.

via Prashant Kothari

Not just Oil...

Yahoo! News - Halliburton Refunding $27 Mln for Meals

So, it is not only oil-supplying contract. Halliburton is fleecing the US millitary by overcharging for food too. They paid back $6.3 million for overcharge of more than $60 million for the oil-supply. By using the same formula, is this overcharge about $270 million????

Nobody is being held responsible for these haywire contracts. I would expect some heads to roll when this was exposed. Maybe, the Chenney connection is really working well.

Moonlit landscape

Evolution or Not?

Georgia Takes on 'Evolution'

Looks like Georgia is following Kansas' example in rejecting 'Evolution' just as a theory in school classrooms. Another attempt to push religion in schools. This is definitely detrimental when done at the expense of pushing scientific facts and years of fundamental research out the door. Here is the reason for this action as told by Georgia's schools superitendant, Kathy Cox:

A handful of states already omit the word "evolution" from their teaching guidelines, and Ms. Cox called it "a buzz word that causes a lot of negative reaction." She added that people often associate it with "that monkeys-to-man sort of thing."
...
In Alabama, the state board of education voted in 2001 to place disclaimers on biology textbooks to describe evolution as a controversial theory.

These actions are resulting into:

David Jackson, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who trains middle school science teachers, said about half the students (i.e. science teachers) entering his class each year had little knowledge of evolutionary theory. "In many cases, they've (i.e. science teachers) never been exposed to the basic facts about fossils and the universe," he said. "I think there's already formal and informal discouragements to teaching evolution in public school."

This can't get any more stupid than this. On one hand there are complaints that enough American students are not going to graduate school and taking up science as career, and how there is a big influx of foreign students to graduate schools in all Universities. On the other hand, the teachers in schools are teaching them unscientific theories and pushing them away from science. Maybe, they are making sure that there are enough people with enough abilities to work at Walmart and McDonalds.

On the factually accurate (I am deliberately avoiding the word 'right') side of the debate is Dr. Francisco J. Ayala, the author of a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences titled "Science and Creationism"

"Creation is not science, so it should not be taught in science class," said Dr. Ayala, a professor of genetics at the University of California at Irvine. "We don't teach astrology instead of astronomy or witchcraft practices instead of medicine."

I can't agree more.

Georgia is the same state where a bill was introduced to change value of 'pi' to 3 to make it easy for school children. I don't recall if it was passed into law, but, for the sake of people of Georgia, I hope it didn't. When will this 'dumbing down of America' stop?

Thanks, Mayuresh

Georgia Takes on 'Evolution'
By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: January 30, 2004

ATLANTA, Jan. 29 — A proposed set of guidelines for middle and high school science classes in Georgia has caused a furor after state education officials removed the word "evolution" and scaled back ideas about the age of Earth and the natural selection of species.

Educators across the state said that the document, which was released on the Internet this month, was a veiled effort to bolster creationism and that it would leave the state's public school graduates at a disadvantage.

"They've taken away a major component of biology and acted as if it doesn't exist," said David Bechler, who heads the biology department at Valdosta State University. "By doing this, we're leaving the public shortchanged of the knowledge they should have."

Although education officials said the final version would not be binding on teachers, its contents will ultimately help shape achievement exams. And in a state where religion-based concepts of creation are widely held, many teachers said a curriculum without mentioning "evolution" would make it harder to broach the subject in the classroom.

Georgia's schools superintendent, Kathy Cox, held a news conference near the Capitol on Thursday, a day after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article about the proposed changes.

A handful of states already omit the word "evolution" from their teaching guidelines, and Ms. Cox called it "a buzz word that causes a lot of negative reaction." She added that people often associate it with "that monkeys-to-man sort of thing."

Still, Ms. Cox, who was elected to the post in 2002, said the concept would be taught, as well as "emerging models of change" that challenge Darwin's theories. "Galileo was not considered reputable when he came out with his theory," she said.

Much of the state's 800-page curriculum was adopted verbatim from the "Standards for Excellence in Education," an academic framework produced by the Council for Basic Education, a nonprofit group. But when it came to science, the Georgia Education Department omitted large chunks of material, including references to Earth's age and the concept that all organisms on Earth are related through common ancestry. "Evolution" was replaced with "changes over time," and in another phrase that referred to the "long history of the Earth," the authors removed the word "long." Many proponents of creationism say Earth is at most several thousand years old, based on a literal reading of the Bible.

Sarah L. Pallas, an associate professor of biology at Georgia State University, said, "The point of these benchmarks is to prepare the American work force to be scientifically competitive." She said, "By removing the benchmarks that deal with evolutionary life, we don't have a chance of catching up to the rest of the world."

The guidelines, which were adopted by a panel of 25 educators, will be officially adopted in 90 days, and Ms. Cox said the public could still influence the final document. "If the teachers and parents across the state say this isn't what we want," she said, "then we'll change it."

In the past, Ms. Cox, has not masked her feelings on the matter of creationism versus evolution. During her run for office, Ms. Cox congratulated parents who wanted Christian notions of Earth and human creation to be taught in schools.

"I'd leave the state out of it and would make sure teachers were well prepared to deal with competing theories," she said at a public debate.

Educators say the current curriculum is weak in biology, leading to a high failure rate in the sciences among high school students across the state. Even those who do well in high school science are not necessarily proficient in the fundamentals of biology, astronomy and geology, say some educators.

David Jackson, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who trains middle school science teachers, said about half the students entering his class each year had little knowledge of evolutionary theory.

"In many cases, they've never been exposed to the basic facts about fossils and the universe," he said. "I think there's already formal and informal discouragements to teaching evolution in public school."

The statewide dispute here follows a similar battle two years ago in Cobb County, a fast-growing suburb north of Atlanta. In that case, the Cobb County school board approved a policy to allow schools to teach "disputed views" on the origins of man, referring to creationism, although the decision was later softened by the schools superintendent, who instructed teachers to follow the state curriculum.

Eric Meikle of the National Center for Science Education said several other states currently omit the word "evolution" from their science standards. In Alabama, the state board of education voted in 2001 to place disclaimers on biology textbooks to describe evolution as a controversial theory.

"This kind of thing is happening all the time, in all parts of the country," Mr. Meikle said.

Dr. Francisco J. Ayala, the author of a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences titled "Science and Creationism," vehemently opposes including the discussion of alternative ideas of species evolution.

"Creation is not science, so it should not be taught in science class," said Dr. Ayala, a professor of genetics at the University of California at Irvine. "We don't teach astrology instead of astronomy or witchcraft practices instead of medicine."

But Keith Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia, says the wholesale rejection of alternative theories of evolution is unscientific.

"My opinion is that the very nature of science is openness to alternative explanations, even if those explanations go against the current majority," said Professor Delaplane, a proponent of intelligent-design theory, which questions the primacy of evolution's role in natural selection. "They deserve at least a fair hearing in the classroom, and right now they're being laughed out of the arena."

Correction: Jan. 31, 2004, Saturday

An article yesterday about proposed guidelines for science classes in Georgia that delete the word "evolution" misstated the sequence of events preceding a news conference on the proposal by the state schools superintendent. The news conference was held on Thursday after an article about the deletion appeared that day, not Wednesday, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The proposed changes were first reported Wednesday morning on the Web site of an alternative weekly newspaper, Creative Loafing.

Be careful, Janet!

If anyone missed the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake 'performance' during the halftime show of SuperBowl XXXVIII, here is a peak...

via Sujit

Window-hangings in moonlight