In the News

Discussion of science, technology, politics, and other topics that aren't strictly philosophical.
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Robert
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Re: In the News

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BBC News - France mulls 'psychological violence' ban
If you insult your wife or husband repeatedly, you could soon find yourself in court if you live in France.

The charge? Psychological violence.

That's what the new offence will be called if a bill backed by the government is passed by parliament.
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Re: In the News

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Abraham Shakespeare, the Lakeland man who won a $30 million Florida Lotto jackpot in November, is being sued by a former co-worker who claims he bought the winning lottery ticket and Shakespeare stole it from him.
http://www.theledger.com/article/200705 ... tto-Ticket
Ford had visited that same store every other Wednesday and always bought two tickets for that day's Lotto drawing, according to his lawyer.

Ford kept the tickets in an overhead compartment in the truck, and there were several occasions when Ford got out of the truck and Shakespeare had access to the compartment, Laurato said.

On Nov. 18, Ford was told by his supervisor that Shakespeare had won the Nov. 15 Lotto. On that same day, the lawsuit alleges, Ford confronted Shakespeare about the missing ticket from his wallet, "and was informed by (Shakespeare) that he had removed the ticket from (Ford's wallet), but that (Ford) could not prove he had done so."

A Convicted Felon that Won the Florida Lottery in 2006 is Missing but the Sheriff Thinks He is Dead.

http://bossip.com/200291/a-convicted-fe ... he-is-dead

Abraham Shakespeare, who had a criminal wrap sheet that included arrest and prison time for burglary, battery and child support won $30 million in the Florida lottery back in 2006. Instead of taking yearly installments, he decided to collect a lump sum of $16.9 million up front.

Moore — who could not be reached by The Associated Press — said she was interested in writing a book about Shakespeare’s life. She became something of a financial adviser to Shakespeare, who never graduated high school.

Moore’s past includes a year of probation after she was charged with falsely reporting that she was carjacked and raped in 2001. Officials said she concocted the scheme so her insurance company would reimburse her for the SUV, which she claimed had been stolen.

Property records show that Moore’s company, American Medical Professionals, bought Shakespeare’s home for $655,000 last January. His mother said the last time she saw him was shortly afterward, around her birthday in February.

The sheriff said the last time anyone saw Shakespeare was in April — but it wasn’t until Nov. 9 that he was reported missing, by a police informant.

According to The Ledger of Lakeland, the 37-year-old Moore contacted reporters at the newspaper in April, saying Shakespeare was “laying low” because people tried to suck money out of him.

That made sense to Shakespeare’s mother — sort of. “I remember once, talking with me over the phone, he said he might go to Jamaica,” she said.

On Dec. 5, a sobbing Moore told The Ledger that she helped Shakespeare disappear, but now wants him to return because detectives were searching her home.

Detectives say Moore paid people thousands of dollars to report false sightings of the missing man, according to Judd. On one occasion, he said, Moore paid Shakespeare's cousin $5,000 to send the lotto winner's mother a birthday card purportedly signed by her son.
Moore told investigators that she had offered to help manage the newly minted multi-millionaire's finances after his win. Judd said that investigators believe most of Shakespeare's after-tax lottery payout of $16.9 million is gone.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/01/06/flo ... tto.winner
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: In the News

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There's a hysterical comical element to the following news story, for those possessing the right size irony bone:

French draft bill to fine burqa-wearing women
The majority leader, who is also openly campaigning to succeed President Nicolas Sarkozy as the right-wing candidate for the presidency in 2017, said the burqa must be banned to defend women's rights.

"We can measure the modernity of a society by the way it treats and respects women," he said.
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Robert
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Re: In the News

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Yeah, how do you expect us to sell all our luxury cosmetic shit to women who hide their faces, eh?!
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Nick
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Re: In the News

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1456200423
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Re: In the News - Myleene Klass warned by police

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Myleene Klass warned by police after scaring off intruders with knife
Tuesday 12 January 2010.
telegraph.co.uk

Miss Myleene Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Myleene, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an "offensive weapon" – even in her own home – was illegal.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: In the News

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Humans were once an endangered species - physorg.com January 21, 2010.
Modern humans are known to have less genetic variation than other living primates, even though our current population is many orders of magnitude greater. Researchers studying specific genetic lineages have proposed a number of explanations for this, such as recent "bottlenecks", which are events in which a significant proportion of the population is killed or prevented from reproducing. One such event was the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that erupted around 70,000 years ago, triggering a nuclear winter. Only an estimated 15,000 humans are thought to have survived. Another explanation is that the numbers of humans and our ancestors were chronically low throughout the last two million years, sometimes with only 10,000 breeding individuals surviving.
Although the catastrophe-upheaval based theories always has made more sense than steady calm progress, I've reasons to believe that the other explanation, that the numbers of are ancestors were chronically low, is more likely than recent bottlenecks. Perhaps homo sapiens is itself one long bottleneck affair: the current mass breeding being a sign of retardation.
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Nick
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Re: In the News

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Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Perhaps homo sapiens is itself one long bottleneck affair: the current mass breeding being a sign of retardation.
How are you definining retardation, and why would mass breeding be a sign of it?
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Tomas
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Fossils could derail potential Arctic coal development

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Fossils could derail potential Arctic coal development

The fossils are of plants and animals that lived about 50 million years ago, at a time when Ellesmere Island was blanketed with forests and was home to alligators, turtles and primates.

Younger fossil sites in the area suggest that Ellesmere Island even had horses and beavers just a few million years ago.

"To find the things in the Arctic, apparently these are the best deposits of that age in Canada, and people have been looking for decades," society president Blair Van Valkenburgh told CBC News. (see reader comment # 23)

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/20 ... ssils.html
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Tomas
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Panopticlick:

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Panopticlick: Your Web browsing is less anonymous than you think

If you are curious about your User Agent string, visit the Website:
see charts >> http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/secur ... ag=nl.e036
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Tomas
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"We the Living"

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"We the Living"

Ayn Rand popularity spurs release of lost film

It was an unauthorized film made during World War II in Italy and, according to the film's restorer/distributor, Duncan Scott, "It caused such a sensation, and such controversy, government officials ordered it to be burned,"
Full story >> http://newsmax.com/Politics/aynrand-fil ... /id/348625
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Tomas
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Last tribe member dies

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Last member of 65,000-year-old tribe dies, taking one of the world's earliest languages to the grave

Boa Sr, who died last week aged about 85, was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo (photo)

Click here to hear Boa Sr speak
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... grave.html
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Robert
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Re: In the News

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The forum over at RichardDawkins.net closes, but will be relaunched under a new 'moderator approved only' system.

From the man himself (link to full article):
The new Discussion area will still permit users to start their own threads, and to post comments. The only significant difference between this and the old forum will be that new threads (note: not the comments) will have to be approved before they appear. This is purely and simply to ensure that all new threads are on subjects relevant to reason and science. It is akin to the editor of a specialist magazine accepting only articles that are relevant to the topic of that magazine. Our old forum contained many excellent discussions on reason and science and related topics, and we certainly don’t want to lose the facility for those. However, it also contained some threads that were potentially harmful to the website’s (and therefore the Foundation’s) reputation. Our goal is to retain the valuable aspects of the old forum, the parts that actively promote the causes for which the website was set up; whilst losing those parts that do not. There will be no pre-publication moderation of comments on our new site: we will just be ensuring that all new, user-instigated discussion threads are on subjects relevant to reason and science.
I used to post there now and again, but recently before closing it down, they reshuffled some of the topic categories - placing the Philosophy forum in the General Topics section. It was previously in Reason, a category title they removed completely.

They're an odd bunch, but not surprising really I suppose.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: In the News

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Australian Becomes World’s First Legal Neutral Gender

A Scot became the very first person on the planet to be given legally a gender as “Not Specified.”
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Re: In the News

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Wash your hands – and free your mind
Pontius Pilate may have been on to something when he decided to wash his hands before allowing Jesus Christ to be crucified. Scientists have found that washing your hands frees you of taking the blame for any unhappy outcome of a difficult decision.
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Tomas
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A New Clue To Explain Existence

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A New Clue To Explain Existence

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered
a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology:

possible explanation for our own existence >> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/scien ... osmos.html
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Tomas
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Purple Snow In Russia (video)

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Purple Snow In Russia

Next is the video that reports about the red rain (video)

Hindu mythology says that the history of every world of time is separated into four ages as follows:

the extent of Kali Yuga is said to be 432,000 years >> http://norcalblogs.com/gate/2010/06/pur ... report.php

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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: In the News

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Love hormone Oxytocin helps soldiers like each other and hate the enemy
The effect resolves around the hormone oxytocin which is released at times of stress and when people socialise with each other.

But the scientists have found that this chemical, often referred to as the love or bonding hormone, also makes them – like mothers – incredibly aggressive to outsiders.
...a biochemical way of saying love and hate are two sides of one social coinage?
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Blair
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Re: In the News

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Yes, sadly the human organism will never evolve beyond these kind of chemical vulnerabilities.
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Robert
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Re: In the News

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Sea snail venom provides potent pain relief
New Scientist.com wrote:Sea snail venom could become the gold standard for the relief of nerve-related pain following the development of a pill that is 100 times as potent as leading treatments.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: In the News

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For the pattern matchers:

2014 will determine course of century
Cambridge University professor Nicholas Boyle argues that 2014 will be important because previous five centuries have also hinged on events that took place in the middle of their second decade.

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenburg church, sparking the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism.

A century later 1618 marked the start of the 30 Years War and decades of religious conflict in Western Europe, which ended with the establishment of the Hanoverians in 1715.

The enlightened Congress of Vienna took place in 1815 following the defeat of Napoleon, heralding a century of relative stability across Europe.

But in 1914 the First World War broke out, a catastrophic conflict that would claim millions of lives and set the tone for international discord throughout the 21st century.
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Tomas
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Extracted teeth could stock stem cell banks

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Extracted teeth could stock stem cell banks

Japanese researchers coax soft, living tissue from inside extracted wisdom teeth into forming stem cells

Of six cell lines tested, researchers were able to establish five viable lines >> http://news.discovery.com/human/teeth-s ... print=true

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Tomas
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Planck telescope reveals universe image

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The first image of the entire universe taken from Europe's Planck telescope has been published.

Planck telescope reveals universe image >> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... image.html
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: In the News

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The chicken DID come before the egg
Scientists yesterday claimed to have cracked the riddle of whether the chicken or the egg came first.

The answer, they say, is the chicken. Researchers found that the formation of egg shells relies on a protein found only in a chicken's ovaries.

The discovery was revealed in the paper Structural Control Of Crystal Nuclei By An Eggshell Protein.
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Birds flying right into oily morass of Gulf

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Birds flying right into oily morass of Gulf

The piping plovers already are flying toward peril. Some birds, including
the common loon and lesser scaup, spend winters along the Gulf Coast.

"Birds are pretty hard-wired to their habitat,"

Scientists say hundreds of species could be affected by the spill

IMPACT ON THE GULF SHORES >> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/env ... rate_N.htm
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