local fluff...,

NASA | The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

see caption"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all."

The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers call the cloud we're running into now the Local Interstellar Cloud or "Local Fluff" for short. It's about 30 light years wide and contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C. The existential mystery of the Fluff has to do with its surroundings. About 10 million years ago, a cluster of supernovas exploded nearby, creating a giant bubble of million-degree gas. The Fluff is completely surrounded by this high-pressure supernova exhaust and should be crushed or dispersed by it.

"The observed temperature and density of the local cloud do not provide enough pressure to resist the 'crushing action' of the hot gas around it," says Opher.

So how does the Fluff survive? The Voyagers have found an answer.

"Voyager data show that the Fluff is much more strongly magnetized than anyone had previously suspected—between 4 and 5 microgauss*," says Opher. "This magnetic field can provide the extra pressure required to resist destruction."

neuronal code

Physorg | How does the brain store detailed information from sensory stimuli? How much can researchers read from the activity of certain regions of the brain? Current findings confirm a new theory. Up to now, scientists had assumed that the early stages of information processing in the brain took place gradually, that is that one stimulus was processed after another in a conveyor-belt-like sequence. This idea must now be revised. As Danko Nikolić from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and his Austrian colleagues Wolfgang Maass and Stefan Häusler have shown, the activity in early brain areas depends on stimuli that arose some time ago. "The brain functions like a jug of water into which stones are thrown and, as a result, generate waves," explains Nikolić. "The waves overlap but the information as to how many stones were thrown into the jug and when they were thrown in is retained in the resulting complex activity patterns of the fluid."

The brain is clearly able to render this information usable and, for example, to superimpose images seen in succession. The duration and intensity of the continuing effect of images that have just been seen corresponds to a very detailed visual memory also known as iconic memory. If you see an image and close your eyes immediately afterwards it remains visible for a short while. It may be located in the primary visual cortex.

Researchers 'read' brain activity
The scientists showed letters to cats while electrodes recorded the activity of up to 100 cells in the animals’ primary visual cortex. The team from Graz created computer-simulated neurons for the interpretation of these signals. Based on the activity of the neurons, the scientists were able to conclude which letter the cat had just seen. Following a brief training period, the simulated cells were able to provide very reliable indications of the visual stimuli processed. The researchers then changed the letters, altered the duration of their presentation or that of the pauses between them. They then tried to predict again which letters the cats were shown and the letters they had seen shortly before. The results obtained support the "wave" theory: apart from information about the image just seen, the neurons also transmitted information about the previously viewed images.

Having established this much, the researchers wanted to identify the aspects of brain activity that involve most information. In the same way as tone, cadence or a word itself carries meaning in different languages, the language of the brain could be based, for example, on the intensity or precise timing of the response. To establish this, the scientists blurred the temporal precision and observed how the predictive power of the simulated cells changed. Without the temporal information, there was a sustained diminution of this power. Hence, the brain clearly codes the information about a stimulus in terms of both the intensity and the precise temporal structure of the neuronal responses.

self-observation, self-remembering..,

NYTimes | Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives?

Russell T. Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent decades refining another way to study the mind. Dr. Hurlburt, a former aeronautical engineer, took up the study of psychology while playing trumpet at military funerals during the Vietnam War. Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, he arrived at the university in 1976 with an unconventional plan to investigate the mental lives of his subjects: ask them for descriptions.

In “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” (M.I.T. Press, 2007), Dr. Hurlburt, 64, presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day. In later interviews, she reconstructed these moments, often under rigorous cross-examination.

The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse.

a presidential operations management moment...,

Truthout | For those of you who may have forgotten, Dec. 22 was the 46th anniversary of the most important op-ed of all the 381,659 written about the CIA since its founding. Do not feel bad if you missed it; the op-ed garnered little attention — either at the time or subsequently.

The draft came from Independence, Missouri, and was published in the Washington Post early edition on Dec. 22, 1963.

The first and the last two sentences of Harry Truman’s unusual contribution bear repeating:

“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency….

“We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

Truman began by describing what he saw as CIA’s raison d’être, emphasizing that a President needs “the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots.”

He stressed that he wanted to create a “special kind of an intelligence facility” charged with the collection of “all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have these reports reach me as President without “treatment or interpretations” by departments that have their own agendas.

A Warning
The “most important thing,” he said, “was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”

Fist tap my man Rembom.

one minute till midnight...,

NYTimes | Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran’s bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. They should be precision attacks, aimed only at nuclear facilities, to remind Iran of the many other valuable sites that could be bombed if it were foolish enough to retaliate.

The final question is, who should launch the air strikes? Israel has shown an eagerness to do so if Iran does not stop enriching uranium, and some hawks in Washington favor letting Israel do the dirty work to avoid fueling anti-Americanism in the Islamic world.

But there are three compelling reasons that the United States itself should carry out the bombings. First, the Pentagon’s weapons are better than Israel’s at destroying buried facilities. Second, unlike Israel’s relatively small air force, the United States military can discourage Iranian retaliation by threatening to expand the bombing campaign. (Yes, Israel could implicitly threaten nuclear counter-retaliation, but Iran might not perceive that as credible.) Finally, because the American military has global reach, air strikes against Iran would be a strong warning to other would-be proliferators.

Negotiation to prevent nuclear proliferation is always preferable to military action. But in the face of failed diplomacy, eschewing force is tantamount to appeasement. We have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.

stay put!

Guardian | Hypermobility is now the opium of the people, an obsession that wrecks communities and planet. There are no free trips.

My solution to winter travel chaos? Don't travel. Stay indoors. Build a fire. Live and shop within walking distance of civilisation. Associate with neighbours. See distant relatives some other time of the year. Above all, do not complain if you insist on laying siege to motorways, stations and airports and the weather or the labour force let you down, as they do every year. It is not their fault, it is yours for being there.

Of all human activities that bring out the selfish in mankind, nothing compares with travel. The externalities of travel economics should be on every school curriculum. We see mobility through our own eyes alone, with no view of the similar demands of others. I am a free and independent spirit innocently enjoying the right to roam; you are a travel-mad lemming who thinks he has a God-given right to tarmac, train or plane just when I am there. Get out of my way.

I need not dwell on the miseries of Copenhagen, except to suggest that it illustrates the problem rather than the solution. The craving to move and to congregate – not least by those who bore all and sundry on the glories of the internet – has been the greatest contributor to CO2 emissions over the past half century, above all from the internal combustion of carbon. Total greenhouse gas emissions from homes (24% of England's total) are now equalled by road transport emissions. Travelling does as much damage to the earth's atmosphere as all other domestic activities put together. Yet powered movement is a craving no government is willing to curb. Hypermobility is the totem of personal liberty. New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has been very indulgent of mobility. Under Blair the cost of private motoring fell to the lowest for a quarter of a century. Sir Rod Eddington's 2006 report calculating that vehicle congestion charges could raise £24bn was rejected. So, too, was his conclusion that better management of the railway could handle demand with no need for new lines. Rail subsidies (which burn carbon too) have quadrupled. Air travel remains largely duty free. Airport construction continues apace, despite some 90% of air travel being discretionary or leisure.

Meanwhile the government pursues a policy of closing such local institutions as primary schools, cottage hospitals and post offices and encouraging out of town shopping and rural housing estates. All lead to an increase in the need for motor travel. If a hospital visit requires a drive of 50 rather than five miles, the NHS does not pay but someone does; indeed everyone does.

no perk too small...,

NYTimes | United States airlines have cut back on all but the most basic services in recent years — for most passengers.

But for their very best customers, some airlines are providing extra perks and creating new tiers of status to make them feel special. Continental Airlines, for example, created a new top category this month, Presidential Platinum, for customers flying at least 125,000 miles and spending $30,000 a year on plane tickets. Delta Air Lines established the new Diamond level this summer for customers who earn a minimum of 125,000 miles each year.

Members at these levels, in addition to getting bragging rights, might be offered free access to airport clubs and automatic check-in, might get fees for extra bags waived, and might be allowed to go to the front of any line — and sit in the front of the cabin — even when other travelers paid more for their tickets.

Once inside those airline clubs, these elite fliers can get free cocktails and buffet meals, perhaps a shower, and in the case of some Delta clubs, practice time on putting greens.

Airlines are also studying how to create a greater sense of personalized service on board — perhaps allowing passengers to preorder a favorite wine for an international flight or a special treat for an anniversary, or letting them designate a favorite seat on various kinds of aircraft so they sit in the same place on every flight.

Giving special perks to the biggest spenders is an old trick used by casinos, who pamper the “whales” so they feel appreciated more than all the “minnows” that populate lower-stakes poker tables.

oil, economics, and politics...,

ASPO | If peak oil were our only problem, we could mobilize our nation on an emergency basis to deal with the problem in a straightforward way. In our real world, there is a complex interaction between oil supply, economics and politics. Our economic system is constantly interacting with the politics that makes the rules that govern our economic system. Politics is anything but an efficient way to achieve rational change. The geology is the easy part, but it is the complexity of the social response that makes peak oil difficult to study. The following link provides my expanded explanation in several essays, along with more documentation. Some of the main points are collected below.

Energy analyst Tom Whipple recently pointed out that our global economic options seem to be increasingly narrowed to the choice between continuing global economic stagnation versus a short start at recovery followed by a relapse into economic contraction and global stagnation. Assuming this is true, use of stimulus spending or any other political and economic policies can’t get us back onto the previous path of prosperity for very long, no matter how wise and skillful these methods may be.

With global liquid fuel production probably maxed-out below 90 million barrels a day, and global petroleum reserve capacity thought to be less than 6 million barrels a day, a 5% or more annual average depletion rate implies that the world will use up all our reserve cushion within a year or two. The return of another tight global oil market will be accompanied by the return of the crippling oil price increases we saw in mid-2008, but this time imposed on a weaker economy.

The economic crisis is resulting in a huge gap between the global growth predicted by the banking and finance system versus the disappointing performance of the global economy. This shortfall is strongly reflected as political discontent. Centuries of economic expansion have taught us to regard continuous growth as normal. The economic system seems to be broken when this is not the case, and people expect politicians to fix things. Nobody can predict even the economic outcome very well, because it is so largely based on consumer psychology.

documenting misdeeds

NYTimes | It was a simple idea: use the power and elusiveness of the Internet to publish secret documents that someone, somewhere thought should be made public. And dare the government, any government, to shut you down.

Since its founding in late 2006, the Web site WikiLeaks.org has pursued that idea to the heights of commercial and political power — exposing internal memos about the dumping of toxic material off the African coast, the membership rolls of a racist British party, and most recently more than half a million pager messages from around the time of the 9/11 attacks, including some from government officials.

But the time has come for WikiLeaks, which calls itself “the first intelligence agency of the people,” to think locally, says Daniel Schmitt, a German computer engineer who is a full-time unpaid spokesman for the Web site. “We are trying to bring WikiLeaks more directly to communities,” he said in a telephone interview.

The organization has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation’s News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news.

WikiLeaks proposes using the grant to encourage local newspapers to include a link to WikiLeaks’ secure, anonymous servers so that readers can submit documents on local issues or scandals. The newspapers would have first crack at the material, and after a period of time — perhaps two weeks, Mr. Schmitt said — the documents would be made public on the main WikiLeaks page.

For an organization that publicizes hidden documents, WikiLeaks is adamant about protecting the anonymity of the document donors. “We maintain our servers at undisclosed locations, pass communication through protective jurisdictions, keep no traffic logs, and use military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information,” the proposal reads in part. So unlike other online applicants, however, WikiLeaks cannot refer to a spike in Internet traffic in its pitch for itself.

“We are not really in a position to do that,” Mr. Schmitt said. “We have strong stands on anonymity and don’t have log files on users.”

the love of lust

Open | The so-called sexual revolution has created a generation of braggarts who love to flaunt their sexual prowess. Flip the coin, and what you see is a society of men and women anxious not to be seen as sexual have-nots.

Sexuality was glorified in the 20th century as a tool for transforming the world, which was supposed to establish mankind in a state of quasi-perfection. And along the lines of the economic model, the ambiguous expression of ‘sexual deprivation’ was coined, implying a scale of libidinal prosperity. Hence, there would be the rich and the poor, pleasure- seekers and survivors, those who celebrated the body magnificently and those reduced to the strict minimum. Today, no one wants to be a sexual ‘have-not’— everyone flaunts an honourable service record, even in the dullest of marriages. Like one’s profession, salary or physical appearance, sex too has become an external sign of wealth that individuals add to their social paraphernalia. A new human species has emerged—that of hedonist ascetics who expend a great deal of energy to stir their senses and achieve a state of bliss. They work hard at their pleasure and are really tormented souls—enduring insecurity is the other side of the coin in their unceasing quest for pleasure. Such as, for instance, the young therapist, who never had an orgasm (in the Canadian film Shortbus, released in 2006) and spent her time masturbating frantically, seeking ‘The Big O’ like everyone else—the Great Orgasm that is not debauchery, but Grace, the Holy Grail, the passport to humanity redeemed.

However, there is a world of difference between what this society says about itself and the life it lives in reality. For the past half-a-century, all surveys on the sex lives of the French, Americans, Germans or Spanish have revealed that we are prey to the same obsessions, the same difficulties: male erectile disorders and difficult or impossible orgasms for women. The Kinsey Report, drafted in the aftermath of the 1948 war, threw light on sexual practices among Americans that were not really in line with moral standards. Our current investigations point to us being wiser than we think. We were considered shameless in the past, but today, we’re seen as braggarts. Our parents used to lie about their morality, but we lie about our immorality. In both cases, there is a disparity between what we say and what we do. Unlike in Freud’s time, the cultural malaise no longer stems from instincts being crushed by the moral order—it is born from their very liberation. At a time when the ideal of self-fulfilment reigns triumphant everywhere, everyone compares themselves to the norm and struggles to live up to it. That means an end to guilt and the birth of anxiety. However, sexuality is generally still considered something that should remain undisclosed. But people either boast too much to be credible, or hide it for fear of appearing gauche at a time when one’s private life has become a sport of ostentation.