Fresh Fish!

No Fish Tale: Thais Catch 646-Pound Fish
By DANIEL LOVERING, Associated Press Writer

BANGKOK, Thailand - This big one did not get away. Thai fishermen netted a 646-pound catfish believed to have been the world's largest freshwater fish ever caught in Thailand, a researcher said Thursday.


The nearly 9-foot-long Mekong giant catfish was landed May 1 by villagers in Chiang Khong, a remote district in northern Thailand, and weighed by Thai fisheries department officials, said Zeb Hogan, who leads an international project to locate and study the world's largest freshwater fish species.

He confirmed it was the heaviest fish on record since Thailand started keeping such statistics in 1981.

The fishermen had hoped to sell the fish to environmental groups, which planned to release it to spawn upriver, but it died before it could be handed over and then was chopped up and sold in pieces to villagers as food.

Hogan, whose work is funded by the World Wildlife Fund and the National Geographic Society, said he is planning to write a paper about the catch for a scientific journal.

"That's the best way to document this kind of thing," he told The Associated Press by telephone.

The Mekong giant catfish was listed as critically endangered in 2003 after research showed its numbers had fallen by at least 80 percent in the past 13 years.

Fishermen believe the catfish species has been declining largely because of dams and environmental damage along the Mekong River — home to more species of giant fish than any other river, said an earlier statement by WWF and the society.

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Energy

New York Times (NY)
Climate Shock

The Senate has now completed work on an energy bill that might actually do some good. But that was not the only surprising news from the Senate floor last week: despite ferocious White House opposition, the Senate went on record as favoring a program of mandatory controls of emissions of the gases that contribute to global warming.
It did so in a "sense of the Senate" resolution whose nonbinding nature allowed opponents of aggressive action to dismiss it as meaningless.

The resolution was anything but meaningless. It represents a major turnaround in attitudes, especially among prominent Republicans who only a few years ago doubted a problem even existed. It is something to build on: Pete Domenici, the most influential Senate Republican on energy matters and a recent convert to the global warming cause, has already scheduled hearings to see what sort of legislation can be devised down the road.

And it terrifies the White House because it is further proof that the administration's efforts to minimize the warming threat have failed and that President Bush's voluntary approach to the problem is no longer taken seriously.

The energy bill itself is a mixed bag, though preferable to the dreadful collection of industry giveaways passed by the House. The Senate again rejected all efforts to require higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks, even though that is the surest way to ease the country's dependence on foreign oil. Likewise, its "clean coal" provisions, while potentially useful, fall short of the effort required to develop a new generation of coal-fired plants capable of capturing the gases that help cause warming.

On balance, though, the measure is far more hospitable than recent energy bills to energy efficiency and renewable, nonpolluting fuels, especially in its tax provisions. Over White House objections, the bill includes a provision sponsored by Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico that would require that at least 10 percent of the country's electricity be generated by nonpolluting energy sources like wind power by 2020. And its provisions on renewable biofuels give promise of developing gasoline substitutes that go beyond the heavily subsidized corn-based ethanol so favored by farm-state senators.

It will be up to Mr. Domenici and Mr. Bingaman to make sure that these and other useful ideas survive a House-Senate conference. Fortunately, the House will have nothing to say about the global warming resolution, which will stand as an invitation to future action.

Copyright (c) 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
June 27, 2005
Section: A

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Be like this guy

New York Times (NY)
Graham Ends Crusade in City Urging Repentance and Hope
ANDY NEWMAN

The Rev. Billy Graham, global ambassador for Christ and the most prominent American evangelist of the past century, concluded what might be his final American crusade yesterday with a sermon both apocalyptic and hopeful before a joyously polyglot throng in a New York City park.
On a hazy, sun-scorched afternoon, Mr. Graham, 86 years old and long in failing health, rallied his strength to mesmerize what his organization said were 90,000 people at the former World's Fair site at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. He used his own frailty to underscore the urgency of repentance, warning that the end -- of a person's life, and of the world -- may very well be imminent.

After thanking his 96-year-old musical associate, George Beverly Shea, Mr. Graham said: "I know that it won't be long before both of us are going to be in heaven. You know, Jesus said, 'Be ready, for in such an hour that you know not, the son of man comes.' In Amos, the fourth chapter, it says, 'Prepare to meet your God.' Are you prepared? Have you opened your heart to Jesus? Have you repented of your sins?"

But even as he dwelt on death, Mr. Graham, who seemed to gain strength over the three days of the campaign, held out the possibility of a crusade in London, where he has been invited, and of perhaps even returning to New York, where a marathon crusade at Madison Square Garden helped bring him to prominence 48 years ago.

"We hope to come back again someday," he said. "I was asked in an interview if this was our last crusade. I said, 'It probably is -- in New York.' But I also said, 'I never say never.'

"Never is a bad word," he added, "because we never know."

More than 230,000 people attended the crusade over the three days, Graham officials said, adding to the 83 million who have seen him preach in person in his 417 crusades over the years. Yesterday, the rapt audience spread across 93 acres, filling a vast lawn ringed by London plane and linden trees and overflowing into three more sites where Mr. Graham's visage, rugged and worn but still startlingly handsome, spoke to them from enormous video screens.

The people came from around the city and therefore around the world, and in one section of the great lawn marked with signs on stakes, Mr. Graham's words were simultaneously translated into 13 languages -- Polish and Cantonese, Vietnamese and Urdu, Portuguese and Arabic. The faithful clutched bottles of water against the heat and Bibles against more dire threats, which Mr. Graham reminded them of again and again as he retold the story of Noah.

"Almost everyone today understands that we're approaching a climactic moment in history," he said midway through his 25-minute sermon. "There's going to come an end to the world. Not the earth, but the world system in which we live, which the Bible calls 'of Satan.'"

He continued: "Jesus Christ said, as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the son of man be. When the situation in the world gets the way it was in Noah's day, you can look up and know that Jesus is close to coming."

The harsh words -- delivered though they were in Mr. Graham's formal yet folksy North Carolina baritone, smooth as old whiskey -- were a departure from Mr. Graham's sermons at the park on Friday and Saturday, which centered on Jesus' abiding love.

Mr. Graham freely admits he has been preaching the same two or three sermons for more than 60 years, changing only the topical references to keep them current. When he preached at Madison Square Garden in 1957, he spoke of the scourge of Communism. When he preached to a crowd of 250,000 in Central Park in 1991, he offered succor to a city ravaged by crack and crime.

Though several of the introductory speakers at yesterday's service made mention of the continuing wounds of 9/11, Mr. Graham did not mention the calamity. He simply cited a few national headlines -- the disappearance of an 18-year-old Alabama girl in Aruba, the three children in New Jersey found dead in a car trunk last week -- as evidence that end times are near.

"I believe today God is warning us," he said.

As he has for decades, Mr. Graham kept the focus on the Gospel and stayed entirely away from politics and the divisive issues of the day. He spoke not a word on stem cell research, or abortion, or gay marriage, or even homosexuality, though in the hours before he spoke, thousands of people were marching in the gay pride parade in Manhattan.

In recent years, as evangelism has grown as a political force in the United States, Mr. Graham has come to seem more and more a throwback. Though his savvy use of technology and mastery of marketing techniques have been embraced by the Pat Robertsons and the Jerry Falwells of the world, his peers as a preacher are men like the late Norman Vincent Peale.

"You won't see me identified with any of the so-called religious right," he told an interviewer in 1993. "I'm just neutral."

Mr. Graham's careful avoidance of controversy, along with his scrupulous avoidance of the fiscal and sex scandals that have brought down so many religious figures, help explain the durability of his appeal. Many in the crowd said they had found the simplicity and directness of his message deeply moving.

"Billy Graham has lasted so long because he seems to be true," said Walt Williams, a 23-year-old screenwriter from the East Village who said he has admired Mr. Graham since he read the preacher's autobiography as a teenager. "He's a soft-spoken man. In days when everything is so loud and biased, he talks to people in a loving way."

In recent years, as his health has declined, Mr. Graham has withdrawn from the spotlight, in favor of his son and the likely heir to the Graham franchise, Franklin Graham. The elder Graham suffers from hydrocephaly, or water on the brain, as well as prostate cancer. The effects of a broken hip and pelvis have left him reliant on a walker. He said in interviews this month that he found great inspiration in watching Pope John Paul II maintain his dignity even as his body withered.

But yesterday, as his longish white hair danced in a late-afternoon breeze, Mr. Graham looked as if he could preach again tomorrow. His voice was firm and even as he concluded his sermon, as he always does, by inviting audience members to come forward and give themselves to Christ to be born again.

"You come to this crusade expecting to live many more years, but you don't know," he said. "This may be the last day of your life. You never know. The Bible says today is the accepted time. Today is the day of salvation."

For a few more minutes, Mr. Graham looked out over the crowd with a level gaze, his eyes narrowing, as hundreds, then several thousand people flowed toward the stage, to be welcomed and referred to local churches by volunteer counselors.

Then he put his sunglasses on, and, with the aid of his walker and his son, he slowly withdrew from the pulpit. Half an hour later, the expanse at the foot of the stage was still filled with new disciples.

Copyright (c) 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
June 27, 2005
Section: A

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I'm behind, how bout you?

Number of sexual partners
Durex 2004 Global Sex Survey

People around the world have had an average number of 10.5 sexual partners

More than a quarter (27%) have had only one partner while 21% have had sex with more than 10 people

Men have had more sexual partners than women - 12.4 compared to 7.2

The Chinese have had more sexual partners than anyone else - 19.3 compared with the Brazilians (15.2), the Japanese (12.7) and the Danes (12.5)

Those in Vietnam have had the fewest sexual partners - 2.5 compared with Hong Kong (3.5), India (3.7) and Malaysia (4.2)




Does this survey seem right to you? Let's do our own survey. Leave me an anonymous comment. Tell me your ethnicity, and # of partners. I'll tally the results next week.

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I am so smart, S M R T

Pizza Shop Robber Leaves Job Application

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- A man accused of holding up a pizza parlor left behind a job application with his real name and address, authorities said. "I would chalk it up to either inexperience or plain stupidity," Clark County prosecutor Frank Coumou told the Las Vegas Review-Journal for a Wednesday report.

Alejandro Martinez, 23, of Las Vegas, was being held Wednesday at the Clark County jail pending a Monday appearance in Clark County District Court. He faces felony burglary and robbery with a weapon charges in the May 25 heist.

Authorities said Martinez ordered a pizza and started filling out the application before displaying a gun and demanding money. The clerk handed over $200.

Outside, a witness wrote down the license plate number of a getaway car, leading police to Martinez' home.

Martinez' lawyer, Deputy Public Defender James Ruggeroli, said authorities have the wrong man. He said said the pizza shop clerk couldn't identify Martinez as the robber, and the job application was not presented as evidence at a preliminary hearing.

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@, quotes, or the sperm bank generation. . .@ wins

@ - a Sign of the Times
by Karl-Erik Tallmo

ALL OF A SUDDEN, you see that little sign everywhere - on business cards, with bylines in newspapers, in TV. Those who keep up with the information age may know that it is used for e-mail addresses; the code you write when you send an electronic letter from your computer via modem and telephone.
But what is it called, and how did it originate?
In Sweden it is popularly known as "cinnamon bun", "a-hose", "elephant's ear" etc. In France it is called "arobas" (meaning unknown) or "a roulé", in Holland "apestaart" (monkey tail), in Italy "chiocciola" (snail) and in Israel "shtrudel".
In English it is formally called commercial at or at-sign and has been used for a long time in the sense "at a price of ...(each)": "3 barrels @ $200." Eventually it also took on the locative sense of the word "at".
The @-sign is definitely not a child of the computer age - its history goes far back. Berthold Louis Ullman, American professor of Latin and paleography, claims in his book "Ancient Writing and Its Influence" that the at-sign is a ligature, that is, two letters tied together. The Latin preposition "ad", meaning at, to, toward, was simplified into something like the @-sign we know. The bowl of the a and the d merged and the upstroke of the d was exaggerated and curved to the left.
The @-ligature might be as old as from the 6th or 7th century. At that time the scribes used the uncial, a hand with rounded, sometimes simplified capitals, which could be written with fewer pen-strokes. A lot of abbreviations and ligatures were developed, partly for convenience and partly as a necessity, for writing close to the end of a line.
We cannot, however, be sure that the sign is as old as that. Maybe it emerged (or re-emerged) in the Gothic hand of the 12th or 13th century, a time when many old conventions for ligatures and abbreviations were revived.
Through the centuries, the at-sign has been used primarily in clerical writing and business correspondence. It has been used also in Sweden, and was reportedly available on some early Swedish typewriters.
The at-sign was probably adopted into the computer world around 1970 under the operating system Tenex, and used for e-mail on the early Internet as well as for programming.

© Copyright Karl-Erik Tallmo.
This article was published in a Swedish version in Svenska Dagbladet in 1994, and in the American graphical newsletters Spectrum and Scripta in 1995 and 1996.

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Isn't there a better way?

Biofuel increasingly competitive if oil surge lasts
By Sybille de La Hamaide
1 hour, 58 minutes ago

PARIS (Reuters) - Biofuels would be increasingly competitive if crude oil prices, which are back near all-time highs, were to go beyond $60 a barrel, officials at the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.
Soaring oil prices have encouraged major consumers worldwide to sharply increase their use of "green" biofuels, made from sugar cane, vegetable or grain oils.

But in most parts of the world the additional costs for producing biofuels make the fuel uncompetitive without hefty tax rebates from governments.

"Biofuels are getting more competitive due to the surge in oil prices but these would need to be somewhere between $60 and $100 a barrel for biofuels to be competitive without subsidies," IEA biofuel specialist Lew Fulton said after a seminar on biofuel options.

U.S. crude oil futures hit another all-time record on Monday at $59.52 a barrel as worries over fuel demand festered amid limited U.S. refinery capacity.

An exception is Brazil where ethanol, made from sugar cane, is competitive without subsidy when oil prices are at $35 a barrel, said Brazil's ambassador to Paris, Sergio Silva do Amaral.

The IEA renewed its estimate that all biofuels -- ethanol and biodiesel -- had the potential to reach 10 percent of world fuel use for transport by 2025.

But Fulton said a more realistic estimate was that global ethanol consumption should be between four and five percent of gasoline use by the end of the decade.

"That would be a very big achievement but a lot will depend on oil prices," he said.

Last year the world produced about 30 billion litres of fuel-ready ethanol from fermenting and distilling mainly sugar or corn. In oil terms, that's more than 500,000 barrels per day (bpd), two percent of global gasoline use.

The European Union last year set a non-binding target of 5.75 percent biofuel content by 2010, but missed a more modest 2 percent target this year; Japan allows the use of up to 3 percent ethanol, but does not require it.

The United States, the world's top oil consumer and No. 2 biofuel producer, set a target of doubling ethanol production to 8 billion gallons by 2012 -- over 500,000 bpd and more than 5 percent of current gasoline use.

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Possibly important

Brain Areas Shut Off During Female Orgasm
By EMMA ROSS, AP Medical Writer
Mon Jun 20, 5:32 PM ET

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - New research indicates parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm but remain active if she is faking.
In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain governing emotional control is largely deactivated.

"The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain," said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday to the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men, 13 women and their partners.

The volunteers were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For men, the scanner tracked activity at rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and during ejaculation brought on by the partner's hand.

For women, the scanner measured brain activity at rest, while they faked an orgasm, while their partners stimulated their clitoris and while they experienced orgasm.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men's climaxes didn't last that long. However, the scans did show activation of reward centers in the brain for men, but not for women.

Holstege said his results on women were more clear.

When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during a genuine orgasm.

Even the body movements made during a real orgasm were unconscious, Holstege said.

The most striking results were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated. Deactivation was visible in the amygdala, a part of the brain thought to be involved in the neurobiology of fear and anxiety.

"During orgasm, there was strong, enormous deactivation in the brain. During fake orgasm, there was no deactivation of the brain at all. None," Holstege said.

Shutting down the brain during orgasm may ensure that obstacles such as fear and stress did not get in the way, Holstege proposed. "Deactivation of these very important parts of the brain might be the most important necessity for having an orgasm," he said.

Donald Pfaff, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Rockefeller University in New York, said the interpretations were reasonable. "It makes poetic sense," said Pfaff, who was not connected with the research.

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SotA 1

Entrepreneur's RFID chip implant to open doors, start car
From Wikinews, the free news source that you can write!
March 24, 2005
Link

A technology entrepreneur in northeastern Washington asked a doctor to implant an RFID chip into his hand in order to experiment with the technology. Amal GraafstraA technology entrepreneur in northeastern Washington asked a doctor to implant an RFID chip into his hand in order to experiment with the technology. Amal Graafstra, who runs a technology company in Bellingham, WA, asked a doctor to place the chip under the skin of his left hand, and posted pictures of the procedure to the photo-sharing site, Flickr. Graafstra plans to use the chip for keyless entry to his car, home, or as a login for computer systems.
Implanting RFID chips is a relatively old technology. Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading, UK implanted a 23mm RFID chip into his left arm in August 1998. It allowed him to open doors and turn on the lights in a room as he entered. Further European research in the area was recently dealt a blow when the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies made a presentation to the European Union raising privacy concerns over the potential for such chips to be used to track members of the public.

In mid-2004, about 160 Mexican officials received RFID implants for security purposes, and scientist in the past have implanted themselves with such chips for research purposes. In October 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the implantation of Verichip technology for medical purposes.

An implantable RFID chip is a minuscule capsule containing a microchip and an antenna, all enclosed in glass. The chip that Mr. Graafstra had implanted was 12mm long and 2mm in diameter — about the size of a grain of rice. RFID chips work by storing a unique identification number in the microchip. This number can be retrieved by a special RFID reader that is held within close proximity. Graafstra notes that his chip can be read from a distance of about 2 inches (5cm), and only provides the single identifying number.

Describing himself as a long-time tinkerer, Graafstra's comments do not show much of a hesitation to perform this process. "I like to mod things, and I guess it was only natural that it extended to my own body," he wrote in an email to Wikinews.

Graafstra appears to have been impressed by the process, too. "It was odd feeling it [the chip] being pushed under the surface of my skin... without feeling pain, I was able to really get a feel for just how utilitarian our bodies actually are and how... separate the skin layer really is from the muscle layer under it," he told Wikinews. He was able to use his hand to perform technical computer maintenance just an hour after the procedure.

RFID is a controversial technology. Privacy advocates fear that the technology might be abused by governments and used to track people. Microchip implants have been used for years for tracking lost pets.

The pictures that Graafstra posted spurred commentary in the blogosphere, with some assuming that the pictures — or the process — were faked. Graafstra denies this, and posted a short video of himself triggering the RFID reader with a swipe of his hand.

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