Graphic: Russian Image of Earth
Earth OrientationDolphin: Scientists: Viruses Could Power Electronics
05 Energy, Earth Intelligence
Scientists: Viruses Could Power Electronics
Tuesday, 15 May 2012, 7:12 PM EDT
(NewsCore) – Scientists have developed a technique to generate power with harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.
The breakthrough could mean that one day, we might be able to charge our cell phones with paper-thin generators that harvest electricity from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs, the scientists said.
“More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” said Seung-Wuk Lee, a scientist at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
The device works by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of the M13 bacteriophage, a virus that only attacks bacteria and is benign to people.
Piezoelectricity is electricity resulting from accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to pressure and is the basis for items like electric cigarette lighters and push-start propane barbecues.
“We're now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” Lee added. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”
Read more: Berkeley Lab
Berto Jongman: Interesting Global Security Links
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Owl: Anonymous Makes a Statement – Has Meat, Add Salt
Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Hacking, Liberation Technology, Non-Governmental
This interview overall undoubtedly has misconceptions, self-inflated bravado, gross exaggerations and so forth, but if the last statement he utters is true about people coming to them, even to a significantly lesser degree than he indicates, the world-ruling elites might be quaking ever-so-slightly, but involuntarily, in their boots. And much more so if indeed insiders are giving Anonymous the “keys to the kingdom,” the passwords into it.
Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth
EXTRACT:
Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody. Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.
Phi Beta Iota: 01 Any system built by humans can be hacked by humans. 02 A system's security is heavily dependent on the legitimacy of the system owner in the eyes of those using the system.
See Also:
Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Owl: VIDEO – Twelve Year Old Nails Canadian Government & Banks
03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Movies, Officers CallWATCH THIS. 12 year old Canadian girl on banksters and debt
This little girl is simply amazing. She must have some pretty awesome parents. In a concise and clear way she explains the problem of national debt in language that anyone can understand.
VIDEO (5:26) from GodLike Productions
Phi Beta Iota: Going viral, and rightly so.
See Also:
John Steiner: The Righteous Mind – A Book Review
Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence
Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt
REVIEW By WILLIAM SALETANPublished:
NY Times Review of Books, March 23, 2012
You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.
This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.
Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”
Continue reading “John Steiner: The Righteous Mind – A Book Review”
Review (Guest): I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams
5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Complexity & Catastrophe, Consciousness & Social IQ, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Future, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Mark Dery
Bad Thoughts, Great Book March 27, 2012
By Supervert<
I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can't help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages — death, deviance, intellect. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery's tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery's essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in “Toe Fou,” updating George Bataille's meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna's bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for “invisible literature” in Dery's essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library — a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to “mon semblable, mon frère.”
