Wednesday, October 16, 2013

NBC News Today

Brad Pitt's new film:
Brad Pitt is more than passionate about his new movie, "12 Years a Slave," which opens Friday — he knows it will have a real impact on viewers.
Pitt plays a Canadian carpenter in the film, which tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.
Pitt told Curry that his role is small — he's onscreen for about eight minutes — but putting himself in the forefront was never his goal. 
"I'm there to support the story," he said. "The main performances are Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong'o, (Michael) Fassbender. These are such demanding parts. These guys had to keep themselves in just this perpetual state of angst and foreboding and longing. And they did it."
Pitt said he knows that the film will have a powerful and lasting impact on those who see it.

This movie is coming out Friday. I'll have to talk to Linda or Eileen about going with me to see it. Of course, I have seen many movies by myself, but it's more fun with a companion. Thank goodness my budget allows for a small amount of unnecessary spending.

Warren Buffett on debt default threat:

“Warren Buffett said Wednesday the threat to not raise the nation's debt limit "after you've already spent the money" is a "political weapon of mass destruction" comparable to poison gas and shouldn't be used by either party.

In a live interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman said he doesn't expect the U.S. will do anything to damage its 237-year reputation of paying its bills on time, but if it does it would be a "pure act of idiocy" and "asinine."

On the economy, Buffett said he continues to see slow improvement and pointed out that "two percent a year growth with less than one percent population gains means one percent real growth per capita. In 20 years that's 20 percent. If every generation lives 20 percent”

Warren Buffett is a smart guy. I hope he's right that Congress will come to an agreement on time. I think they can if they want to. They play this game of brinksmanship frequently and have always managed to stop it before the US defaults. We need to make it illegal for Congress or the Senate to use this particular political ploy. I wonder if the Democrats have ever used it. The last two times it has been a radical part of the Republican party who did it.


A real nuclear deterrent

“When geophysicist H. Jay Melosh attended a meeting of U.S. and ex-Soviet nuclear weapons designers in May 1995, he was surprised by how eager the Cold Warriors were to work together against an unlikely but dangerous extraterrestrial threat: asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

After Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, urged others meeting at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to consider building and orbiting huge, new nuclear weapons for planetary protection, some top Russian weaponeers lent their support.

Ever since, he has been pushing back against scientists who still support the nuclear option, arguing that a non-nuclear solution – diverting asteroids by hitting them with battering rams -- is both possible and far less dangerous.
But Melosh’s campaign suffered a setback last month when Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz signed an agreement with Russia that could open the door to new collaboration between nuclear weapons scientists in everything from plutonium-fueled reactors to lasers and explosives research. A Sept. 16 DOE announcement cited “defense from asteroids” as one potential area of study.
President Barack Obama has committed the United States to seeking a world without nuclear weapons, but NASA is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to study their use against asteroids and the U.S. nuclear weapons labs appear to be itching to work with their Russian colleagues on the problem.
Moreover, weaponeers in both countries are citing the asteroid threat as a reason to hold onto – or to build – very large yield nuclear explosives, which have declining terrestrial justification.
Depending on the nature of the work, it could run afoul of several international pacts, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty signed by 129 countries, which prohibits deploying nuclear weapons in space. Some experts worry that radioactive debris from blasting an asteroid could itself wreak havoc on Earth.
To some critics, the idea smacks of bad science fiction. Exhibit A is the 1998 Bruce Willis action film “Armageddon,” which shows a team of deep-sea oil drillers landing on an Earth-bound asteroid, planting a nuclear warhead and neatly blowing the rock in halves that just miss Earth. Film critic Kenneth Turan called it “sporadically watchable.”
In real life, Bong Wie, the director of Iowa State University, says he has a three-year, $600,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design a “hypervelocity nuclear interceptor system,” basically an ICBM-borne warhead fitted with a battering ram.
The ram would separate from the bomb before impact, gouging a crater in the asteroid so the bomb could then blast it to bits.
Keith Holsapple, an engineering professor at the University of Washington, meanwhile says NASA has given him a five-year, $1.25 million research grant to study how either an impact device or a nuclear explosion could deflect an Earth-bound asteroid from its path.

But the leading supporter of the nuclear solution in the U.S. is probably David S.P. Dearborn, a research physicist and weapons designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who is presently helping refurbish the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Wie called Dearborn a senior figure among scientists studying the nuclear option. “I am just following in his footsteps,” he said.
Dearborn said that he was offended years ago when he other researchers told the media that nuclear weapons simply couldn’t work against asteroids. “That’s just not true,” he said, calling these claims scientifically “indefensible.”
For years, Dearborn worked to refute the skeptics on his own time. Since 2012 he said he and a colleague have had a grant from Livermore worth several hundred thousand dollars to work on the project part time, he said. He estimated that about a dozen other scientists have studied aspects of the approach at U.S. weapons labs.
Nuclear weapons could be used in two ways, he says. When the collision is still a decade or longer away, a “standoff” nuclear blast could knock the asteroid off course. When the time to impact is short, he says, defenders would try to blow up the asteroid.
“You fragment it with enough force so that the pieces spread out,” and most miss the Earth, he said. Small bits of rock would burn up in the atmosphere.
There would be no need to build new weapons or test old ones, he said. But shattering a large asteroid close to hitting Earth would probably require a weapon with the yield of about a megaton, or 1 million tons of TNT, he said, which is roughly the power of the largest in the current U.S. arsenal.
Meanwhile, Dearborn says, he hopes to compare notes with his Russian counterparts, saying weapons scientists are in the best position to evaluate nuclear planetary defense schemes.

Melosh disagrees. He was co-investigator on a 2005 NASA mission known as Deep Impact, which launched an 820-pound copper-covered battering ram that gouged a crater out of the comet Tempel 1 in 2005. He says that 90 percent of the biggest asteroids have already been found and ruled out as a near-term threat, demonstrating there is time for find suitable, non-nuclear alternatives – such as hitting asteroids with rams, zapping them with lasers, tugging them off a kamikaze trajectory, or deflecting them with solar sails.

The actual 47-page U.S.-Russian agreement – which the Energy agency has not released but the Center for Public Integrity obtained -- does not mention asteroids and instead lays out broad areas for potential cooperation between nuclear weapons complexes on civilian nuclear power, including plutonium-fueled breeder reactor research, and other nuclear-related technologies.
“We are making the implementation of the agreement a priority and will be reviewing possible projects soon,” Energy Department spokeswoman Keri Fulton said in an email, after declining to address the mention of asteroid defense.

The Russians, for their part, are also weighing a nuclear response to the asteroid threat. “In the opinion of Oleg Shubin, a departmental director at Rosatom, non-nuclear ways of deflecting and destroying Earth-bound asteroids may be exotic but ineffective,” the state-owned Russian news service RIA Novosti reported March 25.
David Wright, co-director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, said he hoped any joint asteroid defense work would not become a “jobs program” for weapons scientists.
“When you’ve got the weapons labs sort of pushing for this in the various countries, it starts to make me feel a little uneasy,” he said. “Which doesn’t mean it’s not a legitimate thing to do, but you want to know it’s being done for legitimate reasons.”

Several times every year there is an announcement on the news of an asteroid coming uncomfortably close to the earth. I have to be fatalistic about it. I'm going to die someday. A hit by an asteroid may be a quick death if it's a big one. I do hope they have some real deterrent if one needs to be deflected. I'm glad there is cooperation among nations about it. Maybe there's a real chance of preventing a strike.

Wounded soldier salutes:

A salute by an Army Ranger — hospitalized with serious wounds after a suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan — is warming the hearts of many people after being posted online.
Cpl. Josh Hargis’ commander was at a military hospital awarding the seemingly unconscious soldier a Purple Heart for his injuries, pinning the medal to the blanket covering him.
And that's when Hargis surprisingly raised his arm to salute — struggling with his doctors and medical tubes to do so.
The commander sent a picture along with a letter about the incident to Hargis’ wife, Taylor, writing that "grown men began to weep" at the sight of the salute.

Hargis was wounded Oct. 6 when an Afghan woman detonated a suicide bomb vest, killing four members of his 3rd Army Ranger Battalion and wounding 12 other American soldiers, according to a report on the website of the soldier's hometown newspaper in Ohio, the Cincinnati Enquirer.

"Josh, whom everybody in the room (over 50 people) assumed to be unconscious, began to move his right arm under the blanket in a diligent effort to salute the Commander as is customary during these ceremonies. Despite his wounds, wrappings, tubes, and pain, Josh fought the doctor who was trying to restrain his right arm and rendered the most beautiful salute any person in that room had ever seen. I cannot impart on you the level of emotion that poured through the intensive care unit that day.
It was assumed that Army Ranger Josh Hargis was unconscious during his Purple Heart ceremony in the hospital, but then he raised his arm in salute. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
"Grown men began to weep and we were speechless at a gesture that speak volumes about Josh's courage and character. The picture, which we believe belongs on every news channel and every newspaper, is attached. I have it hanging above my desk now and will remember it as the single greatest event I have witnessed in my ten years in the Army."
Hargis, 24, is a 2007 graduate of of Dater High School on the city’s west side and attended the University of Cincinnati, NBC affiliate WLWT in Cincinnati reported. He has since been moved from Afghanistan to Germany and onto San Antonio, Texas, the station said.

This story is tops for sheer emotional impact. The human spirit won out. He had to struggle against the doctors who were trying to hold his arm down to make the salute. I hope he recovers from his injuries soon.

Aggravated stalking leads to arrest

Two girls, ages 12 and 14, have been charged with aggravated stalking for what a Florida sheriff described Tuesday as "maliciously harassing" a 12-year-old girl who jumped from a tower to her death. 
The middle school students were booked into a juvenile detention center on Monday night and released to their parents under house arrest, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.
Rebecca Sedwick, 12, jumped to her death from a third-story cement plant structure in central Florida on Sept. 10 after being verbally, physically and cyber bullied throughout 2012 and 2013, Judd said.
"She should be here. And she should be here to see justice getting served," her mother, Tricia Norman said. 
Rebecca Sedwick's mother says she jumped to her death after being terrorized online.   NBC's Charles Hadlock reports.

At a Tuesday news conference, Judd said investigators were in the midst of gathering information from social media sites about the bullies’ interactions with Sedwick, but a Facebook post by the 14-year-old which read, “yes I bullied Rebecca and she killed herself, but I don’t give a (expletive),” prompted Monday's arrests.
Judd said detectives arrested the 12-year-old, who was one of Sedwick’s “primary” bullies, because they decided, “We can’t leave her out there. Who else is she going to torment, who else is she going to harass?” 
While bullying is not a crime, Judd said, the girls have been charged with aggravated stalking — a third-degree felony — because the victim was younger than 16 years old.
"We've lost sleep over that child dying needlessly. And we want to see things change," Judd said. 
In addition to the 14-year-old's Facebook confession, Judd said both girls made "incriminating statements" when they were arrested. 
He said the girls’ case would proceed in the juvenile system and any punishment would depend on juvenile sanctions, adding, “it won’t be severe enough, in my estimation, for this conduct.”
Judd said the 14-year-old started to “torment” Sedwick in 2012 and according to a Polk County Sheriff’s statement, other children at the school also started bullying Sedwick to avoid being bullied themselves. The 12-year-old was Sedwick’s former “best friend,” Judd said.
Sedwick’s mother removed her daughter from the school, but the bullying continued online, where the 14-year-old wrote harassing insults, including that Sedwick should “kill herself” and “drink bleach and die,” Judd said.
“We believe that it certainly contributed to [Sedwick] jumping from the cement towers,” Judd said.

Another bullying story. According to this article, bullying isn't against the law. Maybe there should be a law made, and then these young hoodlums would get the punishment they deserve. Students like that are ruining the socialization and learning experience for the good students. If I had school age children I would probably try to educate them at home. I think they get a better education than the students who go to class in many cases, especially if they have any learning difficulties or self-confidence issues, because they get one-to-one attention at home without harassment. That assumes the parents are educated themselves, at least through high school, and that they don't try to teach by pressure and fear.

Addicted to Oreos?
Oreos are as addictive as cocaine, at least for lab rats, and just like us, they like the creamy center best.
Eating the sugary treats activates more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure center” than drugs such as cocaine, the team at Connecticut College found.
“Our research supports the theory that high-fat/ high-sugar foods stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do,” neuroscience assistant professor Joseph Schroeder says. “That may be one reason people have trouble staying away from them and it may be contributing to the obesity epidemic.”
Schroeder’s neuroscience students put hungry rats into a maze. On one side went rice cakes. “Just like humans, rats don’t seem to get much pleasure out of eating them,” Schroeder said. On the other side went Oreos.
Then the rats got the option of hanging out where they liked.
They compared the results to a different test. In that on, rats on one side if the maze got an injection of saline while those on the other side got injections of cocaine or morphine.
Rats seems to like the cookies about as much as they liked the addictive drugs. When allowed to wander freely, they’d congregate on the Oreo side for about as much time as they would on the drug side.
Oh, and just like most people - the rats eat the creamy center first.
“These findings suggest that high fat/sugar foods and drugs of abuse trigger brain addictive processes to the same degree and lend support to the hypothesis that maladaptive eating behaviors contributing to obesity can be compared to drug addiction,” Schroeder’s team writes in a statement describing the study, to be presented at the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego next month.
“It really just speaks to the effects that high fat and high sugar foods and foods in general, can have on your body. The way they react in your brain, that was really surprising for me,” says Lauren Cameron, a student at Connecticut College who worked on the study. 
“I haven't touched an Oreo since doing this experiment,” Schroeder says.

I do keep the store brand variety of Oreos at home. I use them for dessert after lunch or supper, or both, with a tablespoonful of peanut butter on top. I also use vanilla wafers the same way. The peanut butter gives me protein, and I only eat two or three of the cookies at a meal. It's easy to see that I don't cook. If something needs to be heated, I use the microwave. My stove stays clean all the time, and microwave cooking is much faster.

Early artists were women

Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women.
This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they'd find on their hunt, and it's widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner.
But a new study indicates that the majority of hand prints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers.
"The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic," Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks. 
Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined — they found the art. "[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work," Snow said, and it's possible that "had something to do with it."  

In  National Geographic,  Virginia Hughes explains Snow's finding, published this month in American Antiquity. The new paper includes details from 32 stencils found in 11 caves in Spain and France, where some of the hand prints date back almost 40,000 years. Of the 32 stencils, 24 were likely female. 
The new reading of the stencils "provokes a whole series of other questions," Snow said.
"What was the role of women in producing these," and, where else did they paint? "It may be that all we're seeing is the fraction of the art that survived," he said — paintings on exposed stone surfaces would almost undoubtedly have worn off over tens of thousands of years. 
Over the last decade, Snow has been building evidence to show how the size of hand prints and the relative lengths of fingers can tell us the sex of the artist who made them. He has also  co-developed  algorithms that can let computers scan and analyze prints quickly, and help identify the sex of the painters. 
Other recent work on cave paintings has brought up the possibility that some early European cave art wasn't made by homo sapiens, but by our hominid cousins, the Neanderthals.  Recent dating of the El Castillo cave in Spain, where some of Snow's prints came from,  indicates that the  very earliest cave paintings were made 40,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were still thriving in Europe. 
New evidence and new research methods continue to alter and fill in our understanding of ancient societies. But one thing's for sure: As long as humans have been making art, we've been printing signatures by its side. 

This article makes the suggestion that women may have been participants in hunting, as was claimed in the Jean Auel novel series Earth's Children. In those novels, the societies presented were lead by women rather than men, so they may well have participated in magical artwork. In the Jean Auel stories, the people who did the artwork were those who had a gift for producing art, which was considered a part of the spiritual or shaman functions.

The suggestion here that Neanderthals may have done some of the art is unusual since many archeologists think that Neanderthals were not capable of creativity, as archeologists have very rarely found beads, pierced teeth, decorated tools or statuettes among their artifacts. Other archeologists think that the mental differences between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal were less clearly defined than that, and that they had the mental ability to do such things.

The Neanderthals are known to have buried their dead, and one Neanderthal grave that was excavated in a cave had a large amount of flower pollen in the soil, indicated that they may have buried the man with flowers. That looks like a sign of higher brain function to me. I tend to think that they didn't go extinct because they couldn't think as well, but because those Homo Sapiens coming up from Africa tended to kill people who were different, as we still do to this day sometimes. Genocide is still with us. Chimpanzees are known to “go to war” with rival troops, so the instinct to do the ultimate to carve out a territory goes way back in time and in primate genetics.

Afternoon Budget News update –5:15 NBC news

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, acknowledged Wednesday that he would allow a vote in the House on a newly-minted Senate deal on debt and spending.
"We fought the good fight. We just didn't win," he said on WLW radio in Ohio.

Boehner additionally confirmed that he would "absolutely" allow the whole House to vote on a plan introduced on Wednesday in the Senate. That bipartisan plan, unveiled by Senate leaders, would fund the government through mid-January and raise the debt ceiling until early February.
The speaker conducted the interview shortly before heading into a closed-door meeting with fellow Republicans, who might be reluctant to support the deal because it extracts few concessions from Democrats and does very little to undo Obamacare.
But Boehner said he'd encourage his colleagues to vote in favor of the agreement, which he said would reopen the government as soon as Thursday.
"There's no good reason for our members to vote 'no,'" Boehner told talk radio host Bill Cunningham.

After Republicans agreed not to block a Senate bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, both houses of Congress were moving Wednesday to quickly pass the measure with bipartisan majorities.
Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid announces a bipartisan deal has been reached in the Senate to raise the debt limit and reopen the government.
The Senate is expected to vote first, with the House following suit Wednesday evening.

In the deal, Republicans failed to extract any major concessions on President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, as they had hoped, other than  tighter scrutiny on who gets federal subsidies for insurance.

Rep. Charlie Dent,-R-Pa., said the effects of the shutdown on the party could be long-lasting.
“Is there short term damage, yes.” He said. “Is there long term damage? We'll see.” 

The White House commended the Senate for its leadership, but Jay Carney, the press secretary, was quick to remind reporters of the economic damage already done.
“There are no winners here,” he said. “The American people have paid a price for this. And nobody who’s sent here to Washington by the American people can call themselves a winner if the American people have paid a price for what’s happened.”

Meanwhile I have continued to read my novel. There is only one event that may be a murder so far. A fairy has been taken by vampires, who become intoxicated on fairy blood, and he may be dead. The heroine Sookie Stackhouse has found some old family papers, possibly from her fairy great-grandfather, when she put an old desk up for sale. The agents who came to check out her antiques found the hidden drawer and forced it open. I'll find out more about it as I read on tomorrow.