h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The gay senator story illustrates the biggest flaw in democracy. Elected officials are called leaders but see themselves as representatives.

If the senator was a leader he would tell his constituents that they were wrong about gays and he would try to lead them on a better path.

Then he would lose the next election and some gay bashing demagogue (leader?) would win and vote for the same gay bashing bill (or worse) that the gay senator voted for.

It's true he's a hypocrite but at least he's a pragmatic one.

I just have to mention the Grauniad's front page headline on the proposal for insuring and micro chipping dogs:

'Man bytes dog'

Was it an Airedell?

Bad enough getting them down off the furniture, now you have to get them down off the internet.

An amazing feat of synchronized peeing from my town.


http://www.patspapers.com/images/uploads/flush_game.jpg

Wales rugby legend JPR Williams sucked coins to try to beat alcohol breath test

http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/southwalesnews/Wales-rugby-legend-JPR-Williams-sucked-coins-try-beat-alcohol-breath-test/article-1892240-detail/article.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8550614.stm

There actually is a "Lost Tribe of Israel", sort of. But not in Utah.

TRiG.

That is actually pretty cool. Nice find. I wonder how that thing exploded in battle.

That lost tribe seem to make a remarkable habit of being found, usually every two or three years. http://haruth.com/jw/JewsLemba.html

Then the're the famous Hellawi tribe. When they hunt in the long grass, they jump up and down shouting 'We're the Hellawi'.

Moving on... Listening to the R4 report of the Russian who jumped to their deaths from Glasgow's Red Road flats, I couldn't believe one of the soundbites:

'I don't mind assylum seekers, but not when they're flying through the air.'

Je. Sus. Wept. Some of the comments on the BBC site make for disgusting reading too.

This news item really should be posted in the nighthoover thread (aka:'cancel') but I can't find it.

"There's something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn't be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner.

Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: 'It left us quite unsettled and jittery' he says, 'because this is not something we planned to find'. The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called 'dark flow' not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies - it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe.

Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to rewrite the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?"

The video at the link is not available in North America:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rgg31


~jwf~

The cover of the current New Scientist (which I haven't read) is about possible evidence for Multiverses. Might this be related?

Dark matter, dark energy, dark flow. These scientists need to think up some more creative names.

Having had a quick look at the article in question, it doesn´t appear to be related.

not to judge a brain by its cover but . . .



nice lid, Dr. Kaslinsky!

Not available in NZ either. Damn

dont under estimate the power of the dark side

the study was published a year and a half ago and has had a number of critical responses:

'The results appear in the October 20, 2008, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, which is available online. The authors state that they plan to extend their analysis to additional clusters and the recently released WMAP five-year data.

Astrophysicist Ned Wright posted an online response to the study arguing that its methods are flawed. The authors of the "dark flow" study released a statement in return, refuting three of Wright's five arguments and identifying the remaining two as a typo and a technicality that do not affect the measurements and their interpretation.

A more recent statistical work done by Ryan Keisler claims to rule out the possibility that the dark flow is a physical phenomenon because Kashlinsky et al. do not consider primary CMB anisotropies as important as they are.'

from that wiki thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow


and as wiki says, the paper is available online. Here's a pdf: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.3734v1.pdf

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I was just thinking the self-same thing