Michael Moore on 'The Rachel Maddow Show'

The Dems are going to lose big time.

Every day that Passes I'm happier and happier I didn't cave into the pressure of voting for Obama.

I looked at him objectively and saw he was no force for change in his past and he would not be in the future, plus he was against universal healthcare. Those were enough for me not to vote for him.

I voted for a third party, more socialistic and liberal, candidate. One I could be happy about and approve of if he won.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dems, you are done. Republicans are good at with they do, even if it is literally evil in many ways.

There are no more true republicans, we have only shadows of the source.

Nanometre 'fuses' for high-performance batteries

Nanotubes are wire-like molecules billionths of a metre across

Minuscule tubes coated with a chemical fuel can act as a power source with 100 times more electrical power by weight than conventional batteries.

As these nano-scale "fuses" burn, they drive an electrical current along their length at staggering speeds.

The never-before-seen phenomenon could lead to a raft of energy applications.

Researchers reporting in Nature Materials say that unlike normal batteries, the nanotubes never lose their stored energy if left to sit.

The team, led by Michael Strano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coated their nanotubes - cylinders just billionths of a metre across - with a chemical fuel known as cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.

"One property that nanotubes have is that they conduct heat very, very well along their length, up to a hundred times faster than in metals," Dr Strano told BBC News.

"We asked what would happen if you perform a chemical reaction near one of these, and the first thing we found is the nanotube will guide the reaction, accelerating it up to 10,000 times."

The team used a laser or an electric spark to set off the reaction in a bundle of coated carbon nanotubes, filming the results using a high-speed camera.

High-speed video of less than a tenth of a second of the reaction

But they also found that, through a mechanism that is still poorly understood, the process creates a useful voltage - a phenomenon they have dubbed "thermopower waves".

Their nanotube bundles carry, gram for gram, up to 100 times as much energy as a standard lithium-ion battery.

Since just a tiny amount of energy is needed to start the reaction before it becomes self-sustaining, Dr Strano says it could be initiated in a small device with the energy in the push of a finger.

And unlike standard batteries, the stored energy would not leak away over time, and requires none of the toxic, non-renewable metals in many batteries.

The current implementation is for a one-time use, but Dr Strano says he believes the approach could be adapted to a system in which the fuel is doused over the nanotubes after the initial fuel supply is burned and converted into electrical energy.

"I'm interested in the fuel cell concept," he said. "The conventional fuel cell has been around since the 1800s but corrosive fuels, catalytic deactivation and complexity have been a hurdle.

"From an engineering standpoint, thermopower waves could be a very simple alternative."

For the team, however, the first task is to understand just what is going on in the nanotubes, whose mechanical and electrical properties continue to surprise researchers in a number of fields.

"What we've discovered is more than just a replacement for batteries," Dr Strano said.

"To our knowledge, it's a new scientific area for research. There are many, many questions about these waves: what their limits are what the applications might be."

Source

~~~~~~~~~

Commentary

This is a revolutionary finding! There hasn't been any large leaps in battery technology for a LONG while, and this was needed to give hope to battery researchers once again.

The main problem with batteries, and one of the main problems with Energy as a whole, was that it couldn't be stored properly.

So lets say i get a ton of energy from the sun, and I'm using pollution free solar energy; what do i do when the sun goes down? Now the answer is clear, we use nanotubes to hold that energy and use it whenever we need it during the night.

As an added bonus, we also remove all those polluting chemicals in conventional batteries.

This is a very historic moment and I think it's one that a lot of people will miss but come to rely on in the future for electronic devices.

As we are now addicted to electricity, our hope for the future is secure with these nanotubes. No more will we live a world where our useful energy is sapped away by weak lithium ion batteries. Nanotubes can hold the power indefinitely and are 100 times more effiecient, when it comes to size.

Our batteries just got lighter, smaller, more efficient, and more powerful. A new world has now opened up to us, and the excuses of the past for renewable energy are the way of old dusty history books.

Israel under pressure over East Jerusalem homes

Israel considers East Jerusalem as its territory

Israel is coming under growing international pressure following its approval of new housing for Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem.

Britain, France, the EU and the Arab League have all added their protests against the decision.

The housing row has overshadowed a visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden which is meant to promote a new round of US-led negotiations.

He has condemned the move, saying it undermined trust in the peace process.

Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to hold indirect "proximity talks" in a bid to restart the process, which has been stalled for 17 months.

But earlier this week it approved 1,600 new homes for ultra-Orthodox Jews in East Jerusalem.

The international community considers East Jerusalem occupied territory and building on occupied land is illegal under international law.

Israel regards East Jerusalem - which it annexed in 1967 - as its territory, but Palestinians want it as the capital of their future state.

'Ill-timed'

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband described the Israeli move as "a bad decision at the wrong time".

"It will give strength to those who argue that Israel is not serious about peace," he said.

"Along with our EU partners, I condemn it as certain to undermine the mutual confidence we need."

French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said the decision was "completely ill-timed".

Mr Biden met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank

"It is moreover illegal in terms of international law," he said.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the Israeli decision constituted "an obstacle to peace" and threatened to make a two-state solution impossible.

"Israel should reverse this decision," she said.

Officials from Arab states are due to discuss the issue on Wednesday with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa, who harshly condemned the Israeli move.

"The insult has reached a point that not a single Arab could accept," Mr Moussa said.

"Israel does not care about anybody, neither the mediator, nor the Palestinians."

Mr Biden earlier met Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.

"Yesterday, the decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust - the trust that we need right now in order to begin as well as produce profitable negotiations," he said.

Israel has insisted the decision had nothing to do with Mr Biden's visit.

Source

Families fight 'racist' Israeli citizenship law

Taiseer and Lana Khatib fear one day she might be denied permission to stay

By Heather Sharp BBC News, Jerusalem

"To leave my children, I would die. I couldn't do it," says Lana Khatib.

Five years ago, Israel's controversial citizenship law marred her first year of marriage and still looms large over everything from supermarket shopping to her fears the family might face the prospect of separation.

Adnan, who is three, and one-year-old Yosra squabble over their toys.

Born and raised in Israel, they are too young to understand that their parents both consider themselves Palestinian, but their father Taiseer is an Israeli citizen while their mother is from the occupied West Bank.

And that means, under the current law, Mrs Khatib cannot apply for citizenship.

Life and death

The law is at the centre of a long legal battle in Israel's Supreme Court, with the latest hearing last week.

For the Israeli government, it's about life and death - the prevention of lethal attacks and the survival of the only majority Jewish state in a post-Holocaust world.

For the law's critics, who include Jewish Israelis as well as Israeli Arabs, it's a struggle to use Israel's self-proclaimed standards of democracy and equal rights to overturn what they see as racist legislation.

I don't think it's a racist law but we have to make sure Israel stays a Jewish democratic country Danny Danon Knesset member for governing Likud party

Israeli Arabs - people of Arab descent who stayed in Israel after its creation in 1948 - make up about 20% of Israel's population.

They have long faced discrimination, and some Jewish Israelis fear them as a potential "fifth column".

The Citizenship and Entry Law was passed in 2003, during the second Palestinian uprising, as waves of suicide bombings targeted Israeli public places.

Many were launched from the West Bank, some with the help of Israeli Arabs.

Initially, the law - emergency legislation that has since been extended yearly - said that no-one with a West Bank or Gaza ID card would be given permission to move to Israel to be with a spouse there.

It was amended in 2005, allowing women over 25 and men over 35 to apply for temporary permits to live in Israel, but still ruling out citizenship for all but a handful of cases.

In 2007, it was expanded to apply to citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

In contrast, other non-Jews who marry Jewish Israelis can apply for citizenship through a five-year process, subject to individual security checks.

Since the founding of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, any Jew has been able to move to Israel and claim citizenship.

'Angry and crying'

Mr and Mrs Khatib met in Jenin in 2001. "She is independent, very social, very clever," he said.

When they married three years later, Mrs Khatib was given permission to enter Israel for a single day. The day after, she went back to Jenin, alone, "angry and crying so much".

Mrs Khatib was allowed to enter Israel for just one day when they married

The following year, they visited each other when they could. Sometimes Mrs Khatib stayed illegally.

"I was always afraid," she says. "It was hell," adds Mr Khatib. "One day you have your wife with you, the next you don't."

Things improved after the amendment. But still Mrs Khatib has no state health insurance.

She is not allowed to work or drive and has to renew her permit every six months.

"It's very insecure. Maybe one day they won't give her the permission and I'll be left alone with two kids," said Mr Khatib.

The law's critics argue that it contradicts Israel's self-declared commitment to equal rights for all its citizens.

Sowsan Zaher, a lawyer for the Israel-Arab rights organisation Adalah - one of several that have petitioned the Supreme Court against the law - says the principle behind it is "very, very dangerous".

"It stereotypes every person just because he belongs to a national and ethnic group and discriminates against him because of that," she says.

The petition against the law was heard by an expanded panel of 11 judges

In the court, the state's representative defended the law on security grounds.

In the past two years, 27 people who had applied for permission to join their spouses in Israel were directly involved in attempted or actual attacks, she said.

ISRAELI ARABS About 1.2m, a fifth of Israel's population, are Israeli Arabs They are citizens of Israel, but face widely documented discrimination Former PM Ehud Olmert said there was "no doubt" Israeli Arabs had faced discrimination for "many years" Israeli Arabs own 3.5% of Israel's land, get 3-5% of government spending and have higher poverty levels than Jewish Israelis* There are 13 Israeli Arabs in the 120-seat Knesset, 10 representing [primarily] Arab parties *Source: Mossawa Center Q&A: Israeli Arabs Israeli Arabs defiant on loyalty laws Israeli Arabs vote in anger

And without the law, the numbers would be much higher, she added.

Another defender of the law, Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, for the governing Likud party, says security trumps other concerns.

"The well-being of Israelis comes before any other rights," he says.

But for him there is another issue at stake too - the demographic make-up of the population of Israel.

"I don't think it's a racist law. But we have to make sure Israel stays a Jewish democratic country."

Ilan Tzion, a lawyer for Fence for Life, one of several right-wing organisations also backing the law, put it more strongly.

If the law is overturned, eventually Israel will become "a Muslim state", he says, "the Jewish people will become a minority in their own country", and thus be "exterminated".

"Israel is not like any other country; it was founded on the idea that it will be place for all the Jews in the world as a refuge place," he says.

Case by case

The Khatib family live in the mixed city of Acre in northern Israel. Mr Khatib teaches both Jewish and Arab students at a local college.

"I recognise the state of Israel, but does the state of Israel recognise me?" asks Mr Khatib.

The family could leave Israel, but are strongly opposed to doing so.

"I'm not waking up every day thinking about how to destroy this state, but they are waking up every day thinking about how to kick me out of my place, of the place of my great, great, great, grandfather - before they came here to this land," he says.

Mr Khatib says he understands Israel's security fears. He wants couples to be screened on a case-by-case basis - but Israel says there have been past attackers who would have passed security checks.

The Supreme Court is likely to rule within the next few months.

Campaign groups estimate at least 15,000 couples are affected by the law. Like Mr and Mrs Khatib, they will be watching and waiting.

Source

Joe Biden attacks Israeli plan for East Jerusalem homes

Nearly 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since 1967

US Vice-President Joe Biden has condemned Israel's approval of 1,600 new homes for ultra-Orthodox Jews in East Jerusalem.

Mr Biden, in Israel as part of US attempts to kick-start the peace process, said it was "the kind of step that undermines the trust we need".

Palestinian leaders also condemned the controversial move.

Israel insisted it was a procedural step with no connection to Mr Biden's visit.

The international community considers East Jerusalem occupied territory. Building on occupied land is illegal under international law, but Israel regards East Jerusalem - which it annexed in 1967 - as its territory.

In a strongly worded statement, Mr Biden said: "I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in east Jerusalem.

Kim Ghattas, BBC News, Washington It's very rare for the White House to actually condemn Israel for anything, but Israel's action must have been perceived as a snub in Washington. Just as Joe Biden was talking about a moment of opportunity for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel was taking steps that would infuriate the Palestinians and possibly undermine that moment of opportunity. Mr Biden reminded all parties to refrain from any statements or action that would inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks. On this occasion his message seemed to be directed mostly at the Israelis.

"The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel."

He said the Israelis and Palestinians needed to build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them, adding: "This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict."

Mr Biden said the US recognised that Jerusalem was a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians, and for Jews, Muslims and Christians.

"We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realises the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world," he said.

Palestinian leaders have only recently agreed to resume indirect contacts with Israel, at Mr Biden's urging.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP news agency: "This is a dangerous decision and will hinder the negotiations.

"We consider the decision to build in East Jerusalem to be a judgment that the American efforts have failed before the negotiations have even begun."

A spokesman for the Israeli interior ministry said: "The Jerusalem District Planning Committee today approved a plan which has been in the works for over three years.

"This is a procedural stage in the framework of a long process that will yet continue for some time. The committee meeting was determined in advance and there is no connection to US Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel."

There are still various planning hurdles for the East Jerusalem project to clear, and work is not thought likely to start for at least two years.

Under US pressure, Israel has agreed a 10-month suspension of new building in the West Bank. But the moratorium excludes East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want their capital.

'Moment of opportunity'

Mr Biden is the most senior member of President Barack Obama's administration to visit Jerusalem.

Earlier, at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said there was a "moment of real opportunity" for peace between the Palestinians and Israel.

The Palestinians refuse to hold face-to-face negotiations with the Israelis unless they halt all settlement building in the occupied West Bank, where the Palestinians want their future state.

Speaking earlier, Joe Biden said Washington had a total commitment to Israel's security

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell is expected to shuttle between the Palestinians in Ramallah and the Israelis in Jerusalem.

Mr Biden also said the US was committed to Israeli security and determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

He added that the best long-term guarantee for Israel's security was a comprehensive peace between Israel and its neighbours.

Mr Netanyahu said Israel would continue to support the US push for stronger sanctions against Iran, and that he was pleased its efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were "beginning to bear fruit".

He said the goal of negotiations was a peace deal that included Palestinian recognition of the "permanence and legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel".

Correspondents say there is little optimism in the region about what the indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks might achieve.

Periods of direct negotiations over the last two decades have failed to reach agreement.

Mr Netanyahu's right-leaning government has taken a harder line stance on final status issues than that of the previous administration.

He has ruled out dividing Jerusalem, wants the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, and said he intends to maintain a presence along the eastern border of a future Palestinian state.

On Wednesday, Mr Biden will meet Palestinian leaders in the West Bank before travelling to Jordan for talks with King Abdullah.

Source

Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

By Mark Ward technology correspondent, BBC News

Windows 7 is one of few operating systems that are "4K aware"

Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest format shifts in 30 years.

By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format.

Error codes

Since the days of the venerable DOS operating system, the space on a hard drive has been formatted into blocks 512 bytes in size.

The 512 byte sector became standardised thanks to IBM which used it on floppy disks.

While 512 bytes was useful when hard drives were only a few megabytes in size, it makes less sense when drives can hold a terabyte (1000 gigabytes), or more of data.

The 512 byte format dates from the days of the floppy

"The technology has changed but that fundamental building block of formatting has not," said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate.

This fine resolution on hard drives is causing a problem, he said, because of the wasted space associated with each tiny block.

Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means about eight times less wasted space but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.

"You can get yourself into a corner where you cannot squeeze much more onto the disk," said Steve Perkins, a technical consultant for Western Digital.

This shift also allows manufacturers to make more efficient use of the real estate on a hard drive.

"We can put more data on the disk," he said. "It's about 7-11% more efficient as a format."

Slow down

Through the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (Idema) all hard drive makers have committed to adopting the 4K advanced format by the end of January 2011.

Hard drive makers have begun an education and awareness campaign to let people know about the advanced format and to warn about the problems it could inflict on users of older operating systems such as Windows XP.

This is because Windows XP was released before the 4K format was decided upon.

"The 512 byte sector assumption is ensconced into a lot of the aspects of computer architecture," said Mr Burks from Seagate.

By contrast, Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and versions of the Linux kernel released after September 2009 are all 4K aware.

To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives will be able to pretend they still use sectors 512 bytes in size.

When reading data from a drive this emulation will go unnoticed. However, said Mr Burks, in some situations writing data could hit performance.

In some cases the drive will take two steps to write data rather than one and introduce a delay of about 5 milliseconds.

"All other things being equal you will have a noticeable hard drive reduction in performance," said Mr Burks, adding that, in some circumstances, it could make a drive 10% slower.

In a bid to limit the misalignment, hard drive makers are producing software that ensures 512 sectors line up with 4K ones.

Those most likely to see the performance problems are those building their own computers or swapping out an old drive for one that uses the new format.

Source

Happy Like God

Happy Like God

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions?

I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.

But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau’s final book and his third (count them — he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”:

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. (emphases mine)

This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.

Our lives are filled with endless distractions, but is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous?

On the way to the island, he would pull in the oars and just let the boat drift where it wished, for hours at a time. Rousseau would lie down in the boat and plunge into a deep reverie. How does one describe the experience of reverie: one is awake, but half asleep, thinking, but not in an instrumental, calculative or ordered way, simply letting the thoughts happen, as they will.

Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time

Look at what Rousseau writes above: floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one’s eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one feels neither the pull of the past nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry, but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the “Tractatus,” “the eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or ,as Whitman writes in “Leaves of Grass”: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.”

Rousseau asks, “What is the source of our happiness in such a state?” He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved. He then goes on, amazingly, to conclude, “as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God.”

God-like, then. To which one might reply: Who? Me? Us? Like God? Dare we? But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hybristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.

Why should happiness be bound up with the presence and movement of water? This is the case for Rousseau and I must confess that if I think back over those experiences of blissful reverie that are close to what Rousseau is describing then it is often in proximity to water, although usually saltwater rather than fresh. For me, it is not so much the stillness of a lake (I tend to see lakes as decaffeinated seas), but rather the never-ending drone of the surf, sitting by the sea in fair weather or foul and feeling time disappear into tide, into the endless pendulum of the tidal range. At moments like this, one can sink into deep reverie, a motionlessness that is not sleep, but where one is somehow held by the sound of the surf, lulled by the tidal movement.

Is all happiness solitary? Of course not. But one can be happy alone and this might even be the key to being happy with others. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud when walking with his sister. However, I think that one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love, in being intimate with one’s lover, feeling the world close around one and time slips away in its passing. Rousseau’s rowing boat becomes the lovers’ bed and one bids the world farewell as one slides into the shared selfishness of intimacy.

…And then it is over. Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades. The cell phone rings, the e-mail beeps and one is sucked back into the world’s relentless hum and our accompanying anxiety.

Source

Jesse Ventura Interview

The Chicago Sessions (Marije Meerman, VPRO 2009)

This video is amazing in many ways but definitely get a chance to watch 35 minutes in, for the discussion on happiness.

Dasha Polzik makes an amazing philosophical point emphasized by the great Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

She mentions, inspired by Rousseau's work, that happiness is the relationship in the gap between what you want and what you're able to get.

Bravo mademoiselle, for your insight, and may we look back on the great thinkers in history, remembering the jewels of knowledge they uncovered that we staunchly ignore.

Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street (Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2010)