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March 01: One week from today, after any chat(s):

heart for a while

On March 01, 2012 ("heart for a while", is the correct theme phrase for today, but it was thought to be "trivia" which is actually the March 02 theme word, which led to the following trivial story for today which really has nothing to do with today's March 01 theme phrase.)

2010: This is the date that the international oil group of Shell based in Britain published its draft environmental management plan in which it promised to comply with South Africa's 2007 Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act (Act Number 21 of 2007) and won't do anything in a three kilo-meter buffer perimeter around South African astronomy areas. South Africa and Australia are contenders for hosting the new Square Kilo-meter Array or SKA. In short, it's a radio telescope that observes the galaxies at radio-frequencies from 70 mega-Hertz to 10 giga-Hertz by using three types of antenna elements. Despite the name which implies that it's one kilo-meter squared, the core is filled with five kilo-meters of dish antennas, the middle part extends to 180 kilo-meters, and the outer part extends out to about 3,000 kilo-meters. When all the antenna elements' surface areas are added, they collectively have a radio-frequency collecting area of about a million square meters or one square kilo-meter and hence the name. Why not stick all the antennas close together, so they don't occupy so much space? By moving them far apart and feeding the data and the absolutely time at which the data was collected which changes ever so slightly because Earth is curved and combination of the data as interference patterns, you can make it act as if your telescope is 3,000 kilo-meters wide and gather details that you couldn't get any other way. You don't have to steer this radio telescope by moving it physically, but do so electronically. If it's so good, then why wasn't it built until now? To process the data, it needs a super-computer that will become cost-viable by the time it's ready in 2020. To collect all these data, it needs super-fast data gathering from all its antenna elements at speed and volume greater than that which exists in the main trunk Internet fiber-optics that encircle the globe, although that will also be cost-viable by the time it's ready. It has to be built in the southern hemisphere, where it has a better view of the MilkyWay Galaxy. South America doesn't qualify because it's heavily populated and emit a lot of radio signals that interferes with the operation of the SKA. Designed to see th MilkyWay in the radio frequencies, the urgency to built the SKA to find out what the MilkyWay really, really looks like has been expanding recently when hundreds of planets were discovered in stars near Earth which is finally beginning to let the conventional, old-thinking astronomers to entertain the science-fiction-like notion, that planets, and hence life may be as common as grains of sand on a beach. Why planets and hence life should be so common can't be explained by the conventional, old-thinking of the universe formation, galaxy formation, and star formation, predicted very well by mybookshop which used the historic knowledge on how the hydrogen bomb can undergo compression of deutrium-tritium mixture into helium by the pressure of radiation that mybookshop predicted will cause hydrogen to turn into iron in a fresh, baby, primary star, long before there's a heavy accumulation of helium in the primary star's core, let alone carbon in the core. Even the steady-state formation of matter within the "swiss-cheese" multiple black-holes core of each galaxy is easy to determine by using historic knowledge that's long forgotten. But because these know-nothings control the originally estimated 1.5 billion euros that it takes to construct the SKA, they get to setup the configuration of the SKA's physical shape the way they want. Since the antenna elements themselves are available, wherever it's constructed, the construction is scheduled for 2016 and enough antenna elements, fiber-optic or other data connection, and the super-computer to process all the data ready by 2020 or so. With Africa and Australia as the only cheap-lands for this paln, the first antenna element to be assembled as part of the Australia Square Kilo-meter Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope was built by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in March 2011 at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, the first of 36 12-meters in diameter and 18 meters high antenna dishes. The nature of the SKA demands so much precision that they had to test the antenna surface shape by using an artificial satellite's test signal to holographically verify if the antenna element has the perfect shape that it needs for the task ahead. The tests showed that it's made correctly and that means the other 35 dishes will be constructed along the same design, able to physically rotate in altitude, azimuth, and polarization in unison across the sky, and feeding the data to the central super-computer that can crunk the data. ASKAP will be ready by 2013 and operated by the Astronomy and Space Science division of CSIRO. If this ASKAP of the SKA was made with the previous generation of hardwares, it would have used a radio receiver the size of a small refrigerator at the focal center of each of this dish antenna, but by using Silicon-on-Sapphire CMOS technology, Australian company Sapphicon Semiconductor shrunk down this phased array feed radio signal receiver to only five milli-meters by five milli-meters. Since each dish antenna needs this, reducing a small refrigerator size receiver down to a small micro-chip is at the heart of the SKA that reduces the cost to this manageable price, as well as lowering the operating power cost, and maintenance costs. Sapphicon itself developed this chip in the hope of mass-producing not only with 3,000 for SKA, but by the millions for the even more lucrative market in the cellular telephone market. Indeed, an international workshop for SKA organized by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) with the support of INAF (Italian National Institute of Astrophysics) met on March 30, 2010 through March 31, 2010 to identify economic and societal benefits to justify the by-this-era-estimate $2.5 billion expenditure for the SKA. (There isn't any, aside from validating what mybookshop has been stating regarding the nature of dark matter and dark energy, theory of black hole, and the origin of the universe.) The vague justification was that SKA boosts capacity building and technological learning, a very disappointing set of justification indeed. By May 26, 2010, ASKAP was announcing that it had six telescopes between Australia and Warkworth dish of AUT University in New Zealand that were electronically connected to act as one big telescope with a diameter of 5,500 kilo-meters. This test took readings from the Centaurus A galaxy over a course of 10 hours, generating enough data to fill a nine story-high building worth of DVDs, or two stories with Blu-Ray DVDs, in the hope of hosting the SKA which will need an exa-scale computer. (Able to do one quintillion or one million-trillion floating-point calculations every second at peak performance with the flood of data which will be produced by the entire SKA. No such super-computer exists so far, but the SKA needs such a computer by the time it starts operating around 2020.) There were speculations that the SKA might even be powerful enough to listen to the extra-terrestrial telephone conversations and television broadcasts. (What a hypocritical question, when Earth telephone and television signals are becoming weaker to extra-terrestrials by the extensive use of energy-efficient but short distant cellular telephone netoworks, fiber-glass data distributions, and satellite television broadcasts?) Robert Nichol of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in Britain and Duncan Forgan of the University of Edinburgh tested this suggestion that Abraham Loeb and Matias Zaldarriaga of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics proposed back in 2007 that the SKA can detect Earth's military radar at a distance of 650 light years around Earth. Robert and Duncan quickly shot-down that idea by noting that humans have been using radio for only a century but is already becoming energy efficient and becoming invisible to the outsiders, and there's no reason to presume that others won't do the same. The only way that the SKA can detect extra-terrestrial radio signal is if that carefree planet was deliberately sending out powerful radio beacons to announce its presence to any other planet that was developing its own radio technology. By April 1, 2011, the slated operating time was pushed back to 2024, but still slated to be 50 times more sensitive and 100 times the resolving power of any other radio telescope before it. As for the South African proposed site in the remote Karoo highlands near Carnarvon, 500 kilo-meters nort-heast of Cape Town, Shell is making it less likely that it will be selected, because it wants to drill for natural gas. This site was proposed because it already hosts the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT. 11.1 meter by 9.8 meter diameter aperture 66 square meter optical telescope near the town of Sutherland in Karoo at an altitude of 1,783 meters above sea-level that was built in 2005 within a 25 meter spherical dome, mainly to gather spectroscopic data -- meaning the general chemical composition from point sources, rather than an optical photographic image -- in the near infra-red at 320 nano-meter to 1,700 nano-meter wavelength. The cost to build and finance operating cost for 10 years was $36 million, of which South African contributed a third.), the biggest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. But Shell wants to explore 90,000 square kilo-meters in Karoo by explosive hydraulic fracturing shale rocks to release trapped natural gas around the SKA and SALT sites. For the SKA, the biggest worry isn't this activity, but the radio-wave interference that's generated by the heavy industrial equipments which will swamp the extra-terrestrial radio signals. (SALT will be more affected by the seismic activities of all these equipments moving around, as well as the vibrations and dust that will dull its view of the sky.) In theory, South Africa's 2007 Astronomy Geographic Advantage (AGA) Act protects the proposed SKA core site and the SALT site from any activity that could interfere with astronomy, and Shell published its own draft environmental-management plan on this chat date in 2011 that it will abide by and adhere to the AGA ACT by staying at least three kilo-meters from each site. Why is that bad? Chairman and Vice President of Shell South Africa Energy (Pty) Limited of Shell South Africa, Bonang Francis Mohale, told the South African Press Association that Shell was in regular contact with South Africa's Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Grace Pandor (Born on December 7, 1953 as Naledi Grace Matthews, parliament member since 1994, and she was appointed to this current post on May 10, 2004, by president Jacob Zuma.) to make sure that Shell's activities will have no impact on the SKA, but Naledi herself denied that she was ever contacted and had never had any communication with Shell in this regard, and has never met Mr. Mohale to discuss the proposed project. In other words, Shell is lying, because it only cares about making money for itself, not about some radio telescope that costs money for Shell to comply with some silly Act. Why would anyone consider making the SKA next to a liar company in a politically unstable environment such as South Africa, which is surrounded by unstable governments in unstable ecological environments? The committee that's making the decision on the eventual site doesn't have its heart in the right place for even considering South Africa.

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heart for a while

Indium tin oxide is the transparent electrodes that's normally formed on plastic for monitors and solar cells, but indium is expensive and rising in cost. Suganuma Laboratory at the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research in Osaka University has a new transparent electrode with almost the same transparency and electric conductivity, and unlike the indium electrode, this resists bending, and it's cheaper because it uses silver and it can be deposited on heat-sensitive plastic such as polyethylene terephthalate (Often called "PETE" in North America, "PET" in Japan.) that's used for beverage bottles. Who knows? Maybe they can print a small moving commercial on a bottle of Pepsi? Or a pulsating heart for Valentine, if only for a moment.

During a performance of Frederic Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor in 1848, he saw creatures emerging from the piano which he knew to be hallucination but he had to leave the stage to recover. Since he had these hallucinations of ghosts and goblins all the time and before he took his narcotic laudanum to treat his physical ailment. The latest guess mentioned in the January issue of Medical Humanities is that he was suffering from had temporal lobe epilepsy that produced this complex hallucinations before he died at age 39 from his lung disease that's now thought to be cystic fibrosis. It's tragic, but if he didn't suffer such hallucinations, he probably wouldn't hear good music that he put to paper and remained an unknown composer of dull music.

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On March 01, 2011 (Actually, there is a story with a heart for today involving the founding of Rome and their celebration with "The Rape of the Sabine Women" which doesn't sound like there's a heart in it, but there was, because the definition of the word was slightly different. But it didn't have much to do with mybookshop and there was a need to explain a lot of backgrounds and a lack of will or a desire to explain them. So, how about a shortie? There's a bit of heart in it because baby bottles filled with baby formulae goes into it.)

2011: The manufacture of polycarbonate based baby bottles with bisphenol-A (BPA) becomes illega on this date in the European Union, while importation of such products becomes illegal on June 1, 2011, as declared on November 25, 2010, said John Dalli, the commissioner in charge of health and consumer policy. Canada was the first country to make it illegal last October, and soon US followed, and now the European Union is making it illegal over the protest of the industries which insists that it's safe. So what is bisphenol-A? It was made by the Russian organic chemist, Aleksandr Pavlovich Dianin (Born on April 8, 1851 using the uncorrected Julian Calendar that Russia was using at the time, which corresponds to April 20, 1851 to the rest of us who use the corrected Gregorian Calendar in the village of Davydovo in what is now the Russian province of Vladimir. He died on December 6, 1918 in the city of Petrograd -- As the February 06, 2011 chat noted, it remained the name of this city from 1914 to 1924 when it changed to "Leningrad' till 1991 before it reverted back to "Saint Petersburg".) Aleksandr graduated from the Saint Petersburg Academy of Medicine and Surgery where he worked in its department of chemistry from 1887 to 1916. Among his contributions was the realization that mildly oxidizing phenol (Benzene ring with one hydrogen atom -H replaced by a hydroxyl -OH) molecule connects two molecules together, and this is how he made BPA, although he called it "Dianin's Compound". He also found ways to get phenols to react with ketones, although nothing interesting was noted about BPA while he was alive. About the only interest came out in 1936 when Edward Charles Dodds and Wilfrid Lawson confirmed that BPA behaves like a weak estrogen, a female hormone. There was a lot of interest in making synthetic estrogen for birth control in that era when women were demanding that they should be allowed to have sex without getting married and not worry about getting pregnant, which was a radical idea that was quickly replaced by demands that married women should have the right to control how many babies to raise, which was the accepted answer. Until that era, bathrooms and toilets were not common and babies died quickly and required replacements. (See the November 15, 2010 article on Sara Josephine "Jo"/"Joe" Baker who outraged the doctors who wanted her fired, because she saved millions of babies by her cheap preventative treatments such as vaccination which made doctors redundant and jobless, just like the July 01, 2007 story on the 1818 birth of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who also saved millions of young mothers and their babies by demanding that doctors about to deliver babies wash their hands first, for which he was ostracized, so that the doctors can go back to slaughtering them.) It gave rise to a demand for reliable birth control method, and a cheap birth control pill using synthetic female hormones was the solution. But all works on BPA stopped as soon as diethyl-stilbestrol was discovered to be a strong estrogenic compound. After that, research on the possible toxic effects of BPA was something only a few researchers reported from time to time and ignored by everyone else, just like the early 20th century reports on the toxins in whole wheat which everyone ignored. It was the same thing in 1898 when German chemist Alfred Einhorn at the Munich Universitya nd working for Adolf von Bayer reacted phosgene with with three isomeric dihydroxy-benzenes, producing an insoluble substance that's transparent and heat resistant. It was a polyether of carbon dioxide, or more popularly known now as polycarbonate plastic, although it was regarded as a nuisance back then, something that had to be avoided, just like bakelite. Chemists kept making it by accident again and again without realizing its potential use until 195 when Hermann Schnell at Bayer made it and realized its potential uses and patented it as Macrolon. Just a short time after Hermann, Daniel Fox at General Electric also made it and found uses for it and patented it as Lexan. They negotiated the rights, then worked on finding an appropriate raw materials from which it can be made cheaply, that Bayer discovered in 1958 and General Electric discovered in 1960. What was it? They reacted BPA with phosgene. (Ok, it's not that simple and involves a couple of steps, starting with reacting BPA with sodium hydroxide, but no attempt is made to be technically correct.) Since phosgene is a nerve gas, polycarbonate can also be made by reacting BPA and diphenyl carbonate. It's more expensive than acrylic, but this is more transparent, so that it's used to make plastic glasses (It's not scratch resistant, so that glasses are given a vapor-deposition mineral coating, ultra-violet absorbing coating, and others.) and CD/DVD. (A CD's writing surface is just below the lacquer coating, and the use of a cheap Chinese oil marker that contains smelly and toxic xylene or toluene may dissolve it. DVD's writing surface is sandwiched between the two polycarbonates and said to be far more resistant, as long as you use famous name permanent markers such as fine-tip Sharpie or Staedtler permanent marker which don't contain smelly and toxic xylene or toluene. They sell permanent markers specifically for CD/DVD that they guarantee won't destroy the surface, although microscopic examination of a DVD surface doesn't reveal any problem. With a CD, there may be problems unless you do use those permanent markers specifically made for CD/DVD, although some really, really "Made in Japan" CDs have such an extra thick coating that you can use any color Sharpie or the 20 or so color Staedtler markers that Costco was selling. Costco's TDK "DVD R" -- no '-' or '+' -- are "Made in Taiwan", so expect them to behave like any Taiwanese DVD, since TDK was sold to US investors. Since this "DVD R" behaves like "DVD-R" in a DVD recorder, the images aren't pixelated as much as "DVD+R" on fast-action six hour EP or eight hour SLP mode. Since polycarbonate isn't as transparent at the violet-blue spectrum that Blu-ray DVD demands and whose laser wavelength output range will drift into the violet with age, many manufacturers want to use a thinner polycarbonate unless a better plastic that's transparent at ultra-violet can be found.) You may remember seeing an old episode of "Mission: Impossible" television show in which a man who held the secret that the group wanted destroyed it when he fained and crushed the data-filled CD, but polycarbonate can undergo big plastic deformation without cracking or breaking, which makes it perfect for safety visors and riot shields. It's so great, that even baby bottles are made from it. The problem that the industries ignored that researchers have been reporting, is that this plastic can degrade with water, turning polycarbonate back into BPA. Alkaline solutions accelerate it, as can heat from microwaving, hot water washing, and boiling. This plastic became popular in the 1950's and was used without regard to these researches. US did pass the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act to control how much toxins an average US citizen can eat, but BPA was labeled one of the 62,000 grandfather chemical, which is a chemical that was used for so long that there's no need to test it, just like the carcinogenic air fresheners and respiratory toxic static control chemicals which are highly toxic but because only researchers complained and not politicians or news media, they're continued to be sold and used wildly. In 1982, the National Toxicology Program decided that one part per thousand of BPA per body weight is bad for you, and that this requires ingesting 50 milli-grams of BPA per kilo-gram body weight every day, so if you weigh 50 kilo-grams, then that's 0.05 grams x 50 x 365 = over 900 grams or two pounds of BPA a year, a ridiculous amount that you can't eat, unless you like to eat it by intent, said this US industry study and hence safe. In 1988, it was revised down by the government's Environmental Protection Agency to only 50 micro-grams per kilo-gram body weight per day or 0.9 gram of BPA a year, which was regarded as safe, because cans and other things are lined with this plastic which can cause an exposure of seven micro-grams per kilo-gram body weight per day. US researchers began testing this claim, but their own research showed abnormal growth with as little as two micro-grams per kilo-gram body weight per day or an exposure of only 40 milli-grams per year. In March 1993, US Envionmental Protection Agency again insisted that 50 micro-grams per kilo-gram body weight per day is the safe limit. Then in March 1997, Fred vom Saal at the University of Missouri-Columbia said that this level harms the prostate in men. That November, US Food and Drug Administation found gthat baby formula in cans contain enough BPA to cause developmental and behaviorial problems later in life. The May 1999 issue of Consumer Report found that polycarbonate baby bottles that are heated to sterilize the baby formula leaches out a large amount of BPA, although the FDA's George Pauli said it's still safe. By the turn of the century, BPA will be found to be soluble in water at up to 120 milli-grams per liter, and doesn't evaporate away from soil and water to make it a bioaccumulator that concentrates over time, and there's almost no bacteria that eats it. Other researchers will continue to report about the toxic nature of BPA, such as Siddharth Ramakrishnan and Nancy L. Wayne at the Department of Physiology, David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2007, while the industry which makes and sells it insisted that it's safe without providing any data to back it. Since companies such as Dow Chemical of US and BASF of Germany are major producers of this plastic, they kept blocking any attempt to shut-down this money maker. Then in April 18, 2008, Health Canada, which is the FDA of Canada which doesn't have a big manufacturer of this plastic declared BPA a dangerous substance. (To be fair, it was also the same Health Canada that's making all sorts of herbs illegal, literally on a whim, and they even made sushi illegal for six months before they were pressured to declare it safe. This whimsical Indian head of Health Canada was fired for not taking proper steps in a health problem, but he did make a ridiculous number of things illegal in Canada based on very little if any scientific evidences, although there was a long list of scientific evidences for BPA's toxicity. But to be fair to the fired person, sushi made by real certified Japanese chef requires the chef to be recertified every few years to make sure that he or she remembered how to avoid any parasite in raw marine products. As the head of Kinjirushi company that makes paste wasabi noted, most of the sushi shops in North America are actually operated by uncertified Koreans and Chinese who don't know anything about parasites, who use products that are "good enough" to keep the prices down, and parasites up, which is why you don't hear of parasites infected Japanese, but the number of North Americans infected by these parasites from el cheapo sushi made by unqualified people passing for sushi chefs are rising at an alarming pace in North America.) Once Canada made it illegal, major stores with outlets in Canada, including Wal-Mart began announcing that they'll stop selling plastics with BPA, although FDA kept insisting that BPA level is safe. With US federal government refusing to ban BPA, it was the avant-garde California that became the first US state when its Democrat senator Fran Pavley introduced a bill on March 2, 2009 to ban the manufacture and sale of plastic container with more than 0.1 ppb BPA. Once California took the lead, other US states and cities began taking their own initiatives to ban it. And now, it's the European Union's turn to ban it. Yet US still has a very long list of chemicals such as Tylenol which are so toxic that they're not allowed in many European countries which everyone in US still uses as if they're totally safe.

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heart for a while

On March 01, 2010 (There was no major story that can use the "heart for a while" theme.)

2010: The Bloedel Conservatory in Queen Elizabeth Park in the city of Vancouver in the Canadian province of British Columbia above California on the west coast of North America is slated to remain open until this date, before it may have to close for lack of money. This domed conservatory is named after the timber industry's Prentice Bloedel (1900 - 1996). He went to Yale University with the idea that he won't work for the family forestry-lumber business of "Bloedel Stewart and Welch" located on Vancouver Island, but to become a teacher, but his family persuaded him to join the business in 1929 by managing a new lumber mill at Port Alberni, where he used the vast amount of waste trees and sawdust as fuel to generate power. Up till then, his company was only cutting down desireable trees in the existing forests and not replanting those desireable trees. In the process, all the undesireable trees were also smashed to create a big ecological mess that wasn't sustainable; the only type of timber harvesting method that was practiced throughout Canada by every Canadian timber company, because it was cheap, although the result looked like a mass-slaughter and disgusted many lumberjacks. (mybookshop already noted one disgusting practice in which you just spray sulfuric acid on a tree and the bark dies, leaving behind a timber log that's ready for the mill, and the ground turning into acid that encourages growth of acid-producing moss that kills regular plants and prevents new trees from establishing themselves.) By 1938, Prentice finally started a reforestation program of the sort that's practiced by everyone else in the old world, so that seedlings of the desireable trees are replanted -- mybookshop already noted that all the "eco-freaks" who think that they have a license to pollute with their cars because they paid to have trees planted somewhere are morons, since only one seedling out of a 100 actually survive and grows-up into a big tree. He also began buying-up all the de-nuded nearby Skagit county and Whatcom county whose desireable trees were felled and the rest allowed to rot because they were worthless, and began planting desireable seedlings. (By 1945, he and his father founded the Bloedel Timberlands Development Incorporated that specialized in buying such lands whose desireable trees were removed and the rest abandoned.) Reforestation is a common practice by anyone expecting to be in the timber business for any length of time, but even by 1948, his company alone accounted for 70% of all private reforestation program in the province of British Columbia which says more about how everyone else was destroying their own future than whether Prentice was smart for doing what was normal and expected. Do remember that while Canadian trees grow faster than European trees which is why the Scandinavians chose to plant Canadian trees in their forests, Canadian trees are not managed forests, so that they are small trees in crowded forests with low market values, although this crowded condition maximizes the carbon sequestering to make it high ecological value. As small trees of low value, when you make a shingle, it produces only a few shingles and a lot of waste of no marketable value. By 1948, he began compressing this waste and sell them as fire briquettes. As treasurer of the company since 1942, he decided that the only way to keep many money is by increasing the scale of operation that was done by merging with the H. R. MacMillan Export Company that together became the MacMillan Bloedel Limited. He retired in 1972 to Bainbridge Island in Seattle, Washington state, below British Columbia. Prentice and his wife Virginia bought the Bainbridge Island estate of Seattle from John Collins' heirs to de-nude the wooded land, converting it into gardens and pools that was originally donated to the University of Washington in 1970, but maintaining it proved too costly because like all other Canadian timberland owners, Prentice also didn't have the wisdom to determine if such an estate was within the University's financial means to maintain it, so that in 1974, they established The Arbor Fund which purchased this Bloedel Reserve in 1985 and manage it as a semi-public garden. Prentice also donated funding for the 1969 construction of the Bloedel Conservatory, a 15 meter high geodesic dome composed of 1,490 triangular Plexiglas panels on steel pipes for 100 birds that flies freely inside within the 130 acre or 53 hectare Queen Elizabeth Park up the 150 meter high Little Mountain, the highest altitude location in the otherwise flat and near sea-level city of Vancouver in British Columbia that has the greatest chance of staying above water in a few decades, after the global warming melts Greenland and Antarctica. It all worked well until the economic turmoil of 2008 hit when banks and financial institutions were found to be lending staggering sums of money to high risk lenders with very little chance of every paying it back, and by pressuring people with no ability to pay for big homes to borrow a million dollars each to buy homes, and when they couldn't pay, they walked-off, leaving the banks and financial institutes with worthless homes that were not saleable. (mybookshop explained that such a tactic was applicable in Japan, where the borrower's grand-son can be held responsible for making the final installment of payment for their homes, but such an obligation couldn't be legally enforced in US.) The banks and financial institutes were rescued by government bailouts, and they rewarded themselves with the multi-billion dollar bonuses paid out of that rescue fund. While the financiers can continue to eat sturgeon caviar burgers and wash it down with unimaginably expensive wine every day, the Canadian economy is still in a shamble. The city of Vancouver has a Cdn$61.7 million short-fall for 2010, even while the Bloedel Conservatory's dome is cracking and in need of Cdn$1.5 million to Cdn$2 million to repair it or replace it. As part of the belt-tightening, the Park must cut-down Cdn$2.8 million from their budget, which means that the dome can't be repaired, which means they either have to demolish it and find new homes for its rare plants and its aging animals, or find some other alternative options. There's a new controversy that the dome have been designated a heritage building, in which case they can't destroy it. Some people want to seek corporate sponsors or private donations, while others want to find alternative money-making uses for the dome. Unless they can find more money from somewhere, this may be another "fade-to-black" Bloedel donation that's not going to last for long.

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heart for a while

On March 01, 2009 (heart for a while)

2009: How much trouble did you have with your digital broadcasting? Except for Hawaii which switched in January 2009, your local cable television company hasn't begun to switch all of it programmings to digital until this date, while television stations can stay on the air with analog signal for 30 days past the February 17, 2009 transition date to keep broadcasting messages about the transition from analog to digital. (Not all cable companies switched to digital. They're switching from analog channels to digital channels in steps, although some offer free digital set-top boxes and/or give misleading messages that seem to imply that analog television channels on cable are switching to digital because the on-air television channels are going digital. In reality, they're moving more channels from analog to digital because it opens more bandwidth, since digital channels use data compression to reduce the amount of data that has to be sent. They're pushing-out anyone who only receive analog channels on cable from March 2, 2009 through June 30, 2009. Their behavior isn't very honest, but when they can dictate the terms, they're willing to see how far they can push their customers before they yelp. It's where US is starting to depart in terms of entertainment from Japan, where 50 megabits per second Internet access is cheap and "all you can eat". The Japanese model will allow for digital high definition television service to be initiated through the Internet both wired and wireless, while US has to rely on the designated television frequencies. It doesn't sound much different, but the Japanese model allows the Internet to be used for all communication needs, while US has to continue to distinguish between digital television using an antenna, versus Internet access through other means.) At least that was the story until Barack Obama's team began pleading with Congress to delay the transition. Whether Congress allows it or not, the February 17, 2009 article on the switch-over was removed to enter the "wait and see" mode. Personally, I searched for a good digital converter box, since anything that costs $50 to $60 was said to be awful, placing my mark on something in the $100 to $150 range. Helas. There was no such box sold near me, and I didn't want to mail-order it, since there are only very short periods of times when digital signals are tested, and if I miss it, I don't know if this box produces satisfactory results. That led me to look for either a good DVD-VHS or a DVD-HDD (digital versatile disk-hard disk drive) machine with digital tuner. Searching the web, I found that the Chinese and South Korean brands were getting trashed for their poor picture quality. As for the Japanese brands? They self-destruct shortly after the one year warranty, whether you used it extensively or hardly ever. Their quality has sure went down of late, although further digging into the subject showed that the older they were, the more they exploded, indicating that the Japanese electronic makers were themselves victims of the Chinese counterfeit electrolytic capacitor scam. Tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of those counterfeits are still circulating out there, and the fact that the Japanese electronic companies have assembly plants and subassembly plants in China meant that the procurement offices inadvertently got some of those counterfeits mixed into the batch. But that left me in a predicament for the interim period when I do need a digital tuner. What came to the rescue was a sale of ATSC digital television tuner cards for sale at the Staples stores. The stand-alone ATI box that connects by USB 2.0 (Theoretical maximum of 60 mega-bytes transfer per second, but a lot, lot less in reality.) won't do, because it's so slow that it only displays analog television broadcast. The Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1600 was it for me. You need a desk-top with an open PCI slot, so you can't use a laptop, but the great thing is that if you use that horrible Vista or the next Windows 7, you can stick two cards inside and record two things at the same time, and if you use a Windows XP, you can still stick one card inside. There's no USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 ("Firewire" for you Apple fans), HDMI (high definition multi-media interface), nor DVI (superset of HDMI used as a new personal computer video interface), but it does have TV connector for cable TV, VHS, and for connecting to regular television antenna; another for the ATSC digital TV antenna; a third for the Super-VHS connector that comes with an adaptor plug to connect composite video input, as well as an audio input, not to mention the remote control unit plug. It also came with an MPEG editor called nanoPEG that can cut&paste and join different MPEG files together in a few minutes. Unlike Ulead and others that take hours to make short video, this tiny video editor doesn't compress and decompress files, which makes it as fast as your hard disk drive. Granted; Windows comes with a Movie Maker that can capture video and edit them, but this bare-bone software doesn't clutter you with options for adding various transitions and other features that are about as useful as adding 256 different fonts in one page. In any case, it's just a free bonus for the digital tuner card. Naturally, while you can set analog television broadcasts to various resolutions, the digital broadcast are recorded at whatever resolution it was broadcast, which meant a mega-giga-bytes per episode of Smallville, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Spiderman. I don't need a high resolution recording of any of them, since I don't have a Blu-Ray DVD (BR-DVD) recorder and the people I send such episodes to don't have BR-DVD players. My solution is that my ATI video card has a "TV-out" to output the display signal to a TV, or, a VHS VCR. I send the monitor display output to a VCR which records it at a shoddy quality which is good enough, and then feed that signal into the Hauppauge card's TV-in input, so I have a low-resolution video file that's about one giga-byte per hour of recording with commercials, or about 600 mega-bytes per 42 minutes without commercials. The two megabits per second format at 720 x 480 pixels and the two megabits per second at half D1 at 352 x 480 pixels look awfully pixelated when the televisiion signal is marginal, but it's quite good for everything but the fastest moving images which get heavily pixelated for a second. For anything that you don't want to keep for long, it can record onto a CD-R or CD-RW, or you can stuff a lot into a 4.35 gigabyte DVD-+R/-+RW. The '+' format is the prefered option, since they can store more than mere movies but data. For a keeper, the DVD extra long play format can store about two hours and a half when set for variable data rate. At the DVD standard play, it's only about one hour and 20 minutes. It can record in NTSC which is used in North America and Japan, or PAL, which is used in some parts of Europe around Germany which made this format. So far, a lot of tweeking and fine adjustments and experimentations are still in order, but whether it goes digital or stay analog a while longer, it seems to be just what the doctor ordered in preparation for the February 17, 2009 switch-over (February 17 is the last date that analog was supposed to be broadcast.) until the news of the delay came. Will the Congress bow to the new African-American president, just to see how he handles it? Or ram it through, ignorant of all the problems expected come February 18, 2009?

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heart for a while

It's funny. I thought there won't be any chat with a dumb theme phrase like "heart for a while", but over in Mexico City, they're proposing a bill that makes the brides and grooms held financially responsible for the cost of marriage if they call-off the wedding for any reason. The politicians decided that if they had a change of heart, then it's their responsibility to take care of the cost incurred. Love is blind, and they want financial responsibility when they get their sight back.

Don't worry about amazon.com's unpredictable way they show 20,000 selections one time and then 100 the next, as long as you're using the ancient Netscape Navigator that doesn't have tabbed browsing. If you use tabs, then you notice that an amazon.com search selection may show 200,000 selections on one tab, but only 10 in another, which is an indication of how unreliable amazon.com is becoming.

Researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and the University of California at San Francisco are reporting in the March issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, that they found that the thymus can be stimulated with growth hormone to not only increase the mass of the thymus but also to help stimulate it to produce new T-cells. That means that HIV positive patients who lost their T-cells from HIV can have new T-cells to continue fighting the disease. Giving the HIV patients a hope like that may be good, but the heartful feeling for a while is going to cause those people to go and purchase growth hormone and stab themselves to get their degenerated thymus to regrow again. It's a dangerous thing to announce such a report.

You'd think that the South Koreans would have a heart for the Chinese, but they're now recalling Chinese roasted eel exported by Jiangxi Yichun Eel Industry Development Company Limited after it was found to contain a carcinogen, that means a chemical that causes cancer. The Company also didn't have an export license, making it illegal. But by now, most of us have become desensitized to the poisonous Chinese produce. "You get what you pay." Is the theme that's now flowing everywhere. The only catch is that because of increased energy costs that India and China are fueling, the cost of oil and all the raw materials are rising so high that the Chinese inflation is now double digit percent. That means that the exported Chinese produce and products are rising in cost for the importing wester consumers who keep insisting that because they're willing to take chances with shoddy Chinese quality, the prices have to become lower every year. What a pity for the Chinese, although it's causing a sudden boom in industries that are spring-up in Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries where the Japanese have been setting-up small factories and installing infrastructures to smooth the operations. (Compared to US plants with their laissez-faire attitudes, the Japanese like to take personal commands of the factories and plants to control quality and workshop environment. It doesn't mean that there's no problem in those places, but that the chances of shoddy quality or unhygienic and unsafe work environments are less.) The infrastructures that are set in place help everyone else to transplant their factories and plants to those countries, including those Hong Kong magnates who are shifting their focus from China to those countries.

Arizona is planning to become the Saudi Arabia of solar energy in the supposed desire to add heart to avoid becoming part of the global warming problem. How? They want to use large mirrors to reflect sunlight to a dark boiler that produces heat to turn a turbine. It's expensive and uneconomical, because mirrors are not efficient at reflecting all the light and they're expensive to track the Sun. What's prefered is a modified Australian solution: Enclose a big plot of land, cover the ground surface with black coated black surface to maximize heat absorption and retention with deep 'V' grooves, with air-intake consisting of shallow horizontal ditches covered in plastic tiles. Rocks covering the grooves to absorb the Sun. The heat rises and goes up through the top covered in wind turbines. It works during cloudy days and even for a few hours after the Sun sets because the rocks retain the heat. When this type of solar plant is made big enough, it absorbs enough heat to work through the night and into the next day. Remember, it's mybookshop's idea, which is opening its heart to you for a while.

Fuji Heavy Industries Limited is announcing a new engine, the EE20, the first horizontally opposed diesel engine for passenger vehicles. It means that the engine is much smaller and lighter, and unlike the in-line and V-engines, there is no need for a balancer shaft, which means it doesn't vibrate like clunky diesel engines, yet is a 2 liter engine that can develop 110 kilo-watts of power at 3,600 rpm, but also produce 148 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilo-meter of travel. They have the heart to meet the global warming problem, even if for a while.

On March 01, 2008 (Because this is a leap year, this is the sixty-first day of the year, rather than the sixtieth day. To be frank, there was no "heart for a while" article for today. Yes, this is the mourning death date in 1998 for Claudio Villas Boas. Born in 1916, he was a Brazilian anthropologist whom with his brother Orlando helped create the Xingu National Park reserve in 1961 and the National Indian Foundation in 1967 to protect Brazil's indigenous people and their lands. But, Claudio who? Anyone know him? Anyway to connect him to how Brazil switched its mind-set to include its Japanese population as members of whites so that its parades that depict Japanese use whites? Or may be the nun who was killed protecting the natives? Nope. If he was known here before, he's not known any more.

Instead, a subject that was mentioned from time to time for about a year will be discussed. It's paper chromatography, the very heart of the beginning of fast and cheap analytical chemistry that doesn't need anything complex.)

Happy birthday to 1910: Archer John Porter Martin, whom with Richard Laurence Millington Synge developed the paper partition chromatography to quickly and cheaply separate a mixture into its components for quantitative/qualitative analyses and identification. Born to general practitioner doctor father William Archer Porter Martin and nurse mother Lilian Kate Brown in northern London, England, he went to the boys-only Bedford School fro 1921 to 1929. The elementary school part is called a preparatory school, while the equivalent middle- and high school are called the Upper School. He became fascinated with the concept of fractional distillation used by oil refineries, in which a mixture of different chemicals are separated according to their boiling points. It was so tempting that he cut the tops and bottoms of cans of coffee that he soldered together and filled with coke carbon to make his own 1.5 meters tall distillation towers. He then went to Peterhouse in Cambridge, specifically to its Physical Chemistry Laboratory in order to become a chemical engineer to find all the different chemicals in chemical mixtures. But geneticist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892 - 1964) convinced him that biochemistry has far more mysteries that have to be solved. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1932, he did a year at the Physical Chemistry Laboratory but he then did a research position at the Dunn Human Nutrition Unit's Dunn Nutritional Laboratory at the Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England, from 1933 to 1938, although he received his Ph.D. in 1936. At first, he was doing research on isolating and purifying vitamin E, and the pathological effects of vitamin E deficiency. To do so, he had to develop methods of purifying mixture of plant matter that cured the deficiency and see which part of that mixture contained the cure. Since chromatography became popular in 1931, he and Richard tried to use it to separate the red carotene pigment. In 1938, he and Richard began working for the Wool Industries Research Institution in Leeds. They were in charge of determining the wool quality by analyzing its amino acids making-up the proteins. But amino acids are so similar that determining percent composition of each amino acid was time consuming, expensive, and used a large amount of wool. (Once you know which amino acid you have, you can just see it with ultra-violet light or develop with iodine vapor, or ninhydrin, which is tri-ketoh-ydrindene hydrate, which reacts with any ammonia, primary amine, or secondary amine to produce a deep blue called a Ruhemann's purple -- depending on the mixture, it's anywhere from purple to yellow, and you can tell how much of each amino acid is present by comparing them to known concentration samples called a colorimetric test which just means you compare the colors, although it's now handled by a machines that does the job far more objectively. Since fingerprints contain amines, spraying this liquid produces the outline of the fingerprints from its amino acids except proline which isn't hydrolyzed.) This led them to paper chromatography. An accidental discovery that paper is a homogeneous mixture of cellulose that hinders the movement of amino acids in a mixture of two solvents at a different rate, depending on the size and shape of the amino acids? No, it was planned that way. In 1903, Russian botanist Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet (1872 - 1919) separated plant pigments that are chemically very similar by dissolving them in petroleum ether and ethanol and pouring it down a glass column packed with powedered limestone or calcium carbonate. The plant pigments were held by the limestone until he poured more clean ether-ethanol mixture which caused each of the plant pigment to come out one after another at the bottom. It was described on December 30, 1910 at the 11th Congress of Naturalists and Physicians at St. Petersburg, Russia. Back then, it only worked on plant pigments which you can see as different colors, but several other things hindered this new-found "chromatography" because the colored pigments appeared in bands. First of all, it was only published in Russian, and the rest of the western Europeans ignore anything not written in English or some other commonly accepted Western European language of science. Second, when it was duplicated, the researchers who tried ot used caustic medium that destroyed the colored pigments, so they reported that this method doesn't work. A decade after he died, Edgar Lederer of germany and Richard Kuhn of Austria rediscovered it, used a gentle condition, and it came into use by 1931. Since limestone isn't pure calcium carbonate, the results were inconsistent and unreproducible. Other packing materials were tried but they were also similarly not reliable enough. That applied double for amino acids which are so similar to each other that there was no way of distinguishing them. Archer and Richard tried packing the glass column with starch and it did better -- it's now known that each type of starches have consistent sets of chains that makes it very homogeneous. To enhance the separation, they used two solvents moving in opposite directions through this column, a liquid-liquid partition chromatography. It wasn't perfect, but it allowed them to separate the mixture into separate amino acids. Still working with various medium and solvents, by 1944 they tried replacing the glss column with paper. It's not newspaper paper, but pure filter paper made of high quality and pure cellulose with no amino acid or other contaminants. Put one tiny but measured drop of the amino acid mixture on one corner of the paper just above the level of the solvent mixture, then let the paper become soaked in an enclosure that prevents it from evaporating. The solvents move up the paper by capillary action and move the amino acids with it, but at different speeds for each amino acid. Once a designated amount ot time pass, put the paper sideways for two dimensional layout. Spray ninhindrin, and it produces a series of dark dots. Because of the difference in amino acid movements due to temperature and pressure among other factors, you also run known reference samples to determine which dots corresponds to which amino acids. You can even measure the relative concentration of each amino acids by cutting the paper after it's developed and weighing each piece. It's no longer used because even the same paper from the same company running different batches of paper behave differently, so that it's replaced by thin layer chromatography, which is a thin sheet of glass upon which is coated a consistent thickness layer and known particle size white clay -- silicon. Since it's far more inert, alkaline or acid mixtures can be developed. But it was a fascinating chromatography in its era because it could make-do with very small sample, quickly, cheaply, and accurately. It replaced so many cumbersome big equipments, using large samples, tediously slow, and expensive, that it helped Frederick Sanger identify the sequential order of amino acids in the insulin molecule and Melvin Calvin could see the chemical steps of photosynthesis. It'll also earn them a Nobel Prize in Chemistry by 1952. Before that, he worked for the Boots Pure Drug Company's Biochemistry Division from 1946 to 1948 before moving to the Medical Research Council. In 1952 he moved to the National Institute for Medical Research to head the Physical Chemistry Division till 1956, during which time he found a method of separating volatile substances by blowing them down a long glass tube filled with inert helium in 1953. From 1956 to 1959 he a chemical consultant and also from 1956 he became the director of Abbotsbury Laboratories Limited, and a consultant to the Wellcome Medical Research Laboratories from 1970 to 1973. Then till 1984, he was at the universities of Sussex in England, and Houston in Texas, and Eindoven Technological University in Holland. In later years, he was very dull-minded because he was starting to suffer Alzheimer's Disease. He died on July 28, 2002. He was 92 years old.

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heart for a while

The World Uyghur Congress secretary-general Dolkun Isa is visiting Japan (From Germany, where he now lives.) to ask them for a heart about their plight. The Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region is located in western China. Having heard that the Japanese are sympathetic to Tibet which China also invaded, depopulated, and repopulated with Chinese citizens, he wants Japan's help in spreading the word about their plight. It's an interesting way to ask for help, but he'll probably get a lot more help if he asked rich Saudi Arabia or other Arabian countries. After all, not only do they not look Chinese, but look Muslems, which they are.

Jason DeJong of the University of California at Davis has an interesting way to make the sandy ground around shaky buildings to become steady in an earthquake. Pour a soil bacteria called Bacillus pasteurii around them. This bacteria deposits calcium carbonate around sand grains, turning weak grounds into steady grounds as hard as sandstone, cheaply, and non-toxically. If only weak hearts can be strengthened in this way, although weak hearts will be saved when the ground shakes. It's also interesting to note that sandstones with calcite is just a rock made by this bug.

The Journal of Neuroscience is announcing that prolactin, a hormone produced by pregnant women may be what's keeping the symptoms of multiple sclerosis so much weaker, as if nature is giving a heart to expectant mothers, before pulling them down after giving birth. At least that's what Samuel Weiss et al of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada reported, after injecting a myelin-degrading toxin into the spine of mice and allowed some of them to become pregnant to see what happened to the nerves. Without the hormone, 1/3 of the mice which didn't become pregnant had damaged nerves, while with the hormone, only 1/10 had the damages. But that only presumes that this disease in people is a passive degenerative disease, in which case this hormone is beneficial. If it's an active infection of the sort that mybookshop keeps talking about, nature won't give a heart to any human patient given this hormone. (Planet HD 189733b about 60 light years away and orbiting its star with a year that's only 2.2 Earth days long is also showing no sign of water that was expected. Which is also good for mybookshop who says that this planet cannot have water and other heavy elements in abundance.)

Nichia Corporation, which lost its beating heart when Shuji Nakamura (inventor of blue light emitting diode [LED], ultra-violet LED, etc) left the company, is trying to prove that it still has a beating heart, by announcing a new blue-violet semiconductor laser that can output 320 milli-watts in pulse mode (Previous laser diode's output was 130 milli-watts pulsed. Pulsing cools it between the pulses, allowing for higher power output than in continuous steady mode, although data encoding does demand pulsation.) When used on the new Blu-ray DVD disk, it can record at 10x speed on a double-layer disc or at double-speed on a quadruple-layer disc. It's going to be mass-produced next year, although its estimated life is only 1,000 hours. It's good enough for a camcorder, because a broadcast quality camcorder crew can afford to replace it every 1,000 hours, and a home camcorder user isn't likely to record more than a few hundred hours at most before switching to a newer camcorder. But it's useless for home recorders which easily go through that in a year at 1,000/365 = 3 hours a day. Nichia's heart may be beating, but unless they can improve the life-span, it won't beat for long.

On March 01, 2007 (First of all, let's define what a Jew was. A Jew was just one of the many black African tribes. But by the time their religion moved north to Europe, the northern people preferred that their "savior" have their skin color, just as Asian depictions of Jesus has familiar skin colors and looking like themselves. Among many African tribes then as now, eating human flesh was/is normal, although some ate of their opponent, while others ate their dear departed's flesh. Still others gave their own living flesh and blood. It's only the bias of a few people in Europe and Japan that vilified such acts that made it demonic to eat human flesh, because in those places, only the insane and perverts practiced it, after they killed someone. When tales of Jesus feeding His flesh and blood came to Europe, they refused to believe that Jesus would do something so demonic, and transcribed to the idea that it was a metaphysical thing with flesh being nothing but bread and blood being red wine. This teaching as taught in the Roman Catholic Churce came to be called Transsubstantiation. These changing views happen everywhere. And in the early 1350's, theologian John Wyclif at the University of Oxford demanded changes. Basically, it's not whether a person is high up in the Church hierarchy that makes him a true priest who can perform sacraments, but how pious he was, so that someone who didn't learn al the Church propaganda stories can also perform sacraments. He also had other things that the Church didn't like; vow of poverty and taxing of Church properties. He also believed in Martin Luther's consubstantiation; maybe there was bread and wine, or Jesus also gave his real flesh and blood, or other somewhat murky interpretation that insinuated that Jesus practiced cannibalism without saying so directly. People who believed that came to be called Lollardy, although there are many explanation why that came to be. One person who believed it was John Badby in west Midland, England. He was either a tailor or a blacksmith who believed in Lollard, because otherwise "if every host consecrated at the altar were the Lord's body, then there be 20,000 Gods in England" For this, Archbishop Thomas Arundel condemned him at the Worcester diocesan court to burn or boiled at Smithfiled, just outside the city wall. It's said that the Prince of Wales who later became the English King Henry V took pity on him and offered to spare his life and give him a pension for life if he simply recanted. But John refused, and died in pain on this chat date in 1410.

Have a heart, will you? But the story isn't on the 1904 birth of music band leader Glenn Miller who was born in Clarinda, Iowa state, US and who disappeared on December 15, 1944 over the English Channel. His songs may have moved hearts, but another who's still alive did more.)

Happy birthday to 1927: Singer Harry Belafonte, who was born as Harold George Belafonte Junior to Jamaican father and Martinique mother (Both are in the Caribbean Islands to the south of US.) in the Harlem district of New York City, New York State, US. When his mother Melvine went back to Martinique from 1935 to 1940, he remained with her before they both returned to Harlem to attend George Washington High School. Here his dyslexia became apparent and he had to become a high school drop-out in an era when people simply assumed that he was stupid, because he was African blooded. With nothing better to do, at age 17 in 1944, he joined the navy until the regular discharge in 1945 before he returned to New York City to perform at the American Negro Theater and studying drama at the Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop, while also earning a living by singing at night clubs. His first television debut was in CBS African-American musical "Sugar Hill Times" in 1949 and also signing with Jubilee Record. At the time he was only learning US songs, but soon he learned of the folk music at the Library of Congress American folk song archive, where he discovered his root, the West Indies folk music. Accompanied by guitarist Millard Thomas, he began singing at the Village Vanguard jazz club. His Broadway debut was in 1954 with "John Murray Anderson's Almanac" where he sang the Caribbean song "The Banana Boat Song" that was recorded as the album "Calypso" (1956 by RCA) that not only became a million seller, but also caused a brief Jamaican folk music fad. He also became the first African-American perfomer to win a Tony Award in 1954 for that Broadway musical. He also appeared in the movie "Carmen Jones" (1953), based on Mary Elizabeth Vroman's "See How They Run" on the story of a British West Indies teacher that originally ran in the June 1951 issue of "The Ladies' Home Journal". The movie had only one white actor, Robert Horton, who played Dr. Mitchell. Harry played the school principal. Dorothy Dandridge played Jane Richards, the fourth grade teacher in southern US who had problem with the rebellious 11 years old pupil as played by Philip Herburn who has a fascination with a caterpillar as it turns into a coccoon. Now he likes another pupil Tanya as played by Barbara Ann Sanders who dies from pneumonia as the doctor watches helplessly. Later a swarm of bees invade the class and he finds the queen bee out of the class that leads the rest of the bees out to earn the principal's thanks. The story ends with the cocoon opening, that he presented not to the pupil who died but now to the teacher. It sounds like a story of a dyslexic pupil, although the only part that I can associate with the movie was that I once had bees swarming into my bed room. They found a way inside past the double window panes and the netting, and buzzing me when I awoke to find half-a-dozen flying inside, and the rest of the hundreds of bees swarming between the window panes. I didn't get stung either, although I don't remember how my father removed them. By 1956, his songs "Belafonte", "Jamaica Farewell", and "Banana Boat" were all hit songs. After "An Evening with Belafonte" (1957) became a hit, he decided to do a very controversial movie "Island in the Sun" (1957): The time is the 1950's. Place is some British Caribbean island. Harold is David Boyeur, a politically ambitious black skinned person who gets hot with a white Mavis Norman as played by white Joan Fontaine. (Whom you might remember as born on October 22, 1917 in Tokyo, Japan, as Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland who had some problems with her older sister Olivia de havilland, since Joan kept doing good acting despite their family which had no expectation for Joan.) It's still only slight over a decade when Japanese soldiers who surrendered during World War II were tortured, beheaded and then the skulls taken home as souvenirs while sea survivors were machine gunned, and only half-a-century since untold millions of Filipino boys aged 10 and above were killed like insects and the only reason why the Philippines wasn't completely depopulated of the "brown monkeys" and repopulated by Americans was because so many thousands of well-trained African-American soldiers who couldn't bear to see the boys tortured like themselves defected to the Filipino side. In US like that, this movie caused a huge commotion by its display of inter-racial kiss. Dorothy Dandridge played Margot Seaton, while Joan Collins (best remembered for playing Alexis Morrell in "Dynasty") played Jocelyn Fleury. The movie was very controversial back then, but now even African-American rapists kidnapping and killing white women isn't a big thing, as long as it's just a fictional movie. (But nothing tops reality, such as the white Canadian pig farmer who admitted to an undercover agent that he killed 49 white women. The testimonies are gruesome, with an eyewitness that she saw the guy placing a woman on a hook and then stripping her skin away, before feeding the remains to pigs -- similar thing happened in India, but at least the Indian police wasn't part of the cover-up so they fired the police who ignored the pleas to investigate from the families of the disappeared, unlike the pig farmer, whose case was covered-up by the Canadian police for two decades and none of them was fired after it became public. Skinning captives was also what the Afghans did to Russian soldiers when Russia invaded Afghanistan, which was why Vladimir Putin was happy to help US invade and destroy Afghanistan.) He also did singing tours in Europe in 1958, although he refused to tour the southern states of SU from 1954 to 1961 because the crowds were racially segregated. He also created his production company, Harel, in 1959, to produce television shows and movies on African-Americans. But the movies such as "Odds Against Tomorrow" (1959) didn't make it very big, and why should it? The mainly white audience is told that they're bad and evil. Although his movies didn't do well, he continued to produce records such as "Jump up Calypso" (1961) and "The Midnight Special" (1962). But they soon disappeared from the charts when The Beatles came from Britain. "Belafonte at the Greek Theater" (1964) was the last to enter the Top 40 list. The songs to follow had trouble making the Top 100. It was also many years before he went back to producing a movie with "The Angel Levine" (1970) where he played the angel Alexander Levine who comes to help the poor and elderly New York Jewish tailor Morris Mishkin as played by Zero Mostel who's in too much pain to even buy medicine for his sick wife Fanny as played by Ida Kaminska. But Morris remember seeing Alexander as a thief escaping through traffic and getting killed, and how that thief is back and claims to be a black Jew. But once Alexander recite the Hebrew prayer for bread perfectly, Morris calms down. Fanny seems to improve dramatically whenever he's around, but Morris still thinks that this black Jew is a mental case. I remember seeing it on television before I knew whom Harold was, and only interested in what someone with a name like "Zero" looks like. Besides other movies to follow such as "Buck and the Preacher" (1972) and "Uptown Saturday Night" (1974), Harold spent his time on humanitarian works, such as organization of the USA for Africa, and also one of the singers for the "We Are the World" song in 1985. In 1986, he replaced Danny Kay (real name David Daniel Kaminski) as the UNICEF's Goodwill Ambassador and chaired the welcoming committee for Nelson Mandela's visit to US in 1988. Except for cameo in two movies "The Player" (1992) and "Ready to Wear" (1992), he didn't go back to appearing in movies until Japanese-American director-writer Desmond Nakano directed/written "White Man's Burden" (1995) with Harold as See's Candies factory owner Thaddeus Thomas and John Travolta of "Saturday Night Live" and "Welcome Back Kotter" as Louis Pinnock, the honest and hard-working See's Candies factory worker with impeccable work record. One day, Louis goes to his boss' home to deliver a package, but inadvertently looks at the boss' naked African-American wife. But this is an upside-down world, where African-Americans poke fun at the intellectually inferior whites, where television stars and news casters are all African-American. That small peeping-tom event should have been nothing but a small misunderstanding for Louis, but because his white skin is the color of the lowest man on the totem pole, he goes down and faces the horrors that await him. Harold is still active in his humanitarianwork, and also the founding member of the Institute for Non-violence, which is as far from current US foreign policy as it gets, when US has decimated Afghanistan and Iraq, and preparing to do likewise to Iran under the pretext that iran may make nuclear missiles in the coming decade, while ignoring the immediate threat from North Korea which already detonated an atomic device, which is under the nuclear umbrella of mainland China that threatened to destroy hundreds of US cities and towns, and which still celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This is the same China that US view as its ally who should not be offended, even though the same China isn't threatening to destroy Japan, celebrate every major tragedy in Japan, nor do anything much no matter how Japan offends China. If after all this, North Korea with Chinese help rains destruction upon US, then US got everything it deserves. There's no need to show pity and give a heart.

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Sc-tech->heart for a while

"heart for a while" was supposed to be the theme for March 01, 2006, but a slight mistake in the dating gave the impression that it was March 02's "trivia" theme. So, have a heart and forgive the fact that the prolog chats keep mentioning "trivia", instead of "heart".

38 years old Colombian mother in Madrid, Spain, Rosario gave birth to a 12 pound baby. They claim it's genetic, but they should just watch their diet. It's always caused by diabetes.

Using the new Simply Slim program that Toyota's 300 Japanese engineers perfected to halve the cost of building the Camry engine from around $2,000 to $1,000 despite the historically high cost of the aluminum to make it, it's no wonder that Toyota managed to earn $11.4 billion in 2005, far more than what the top 10 world car manufacturers earned. As long as Toyota is forced to keep price up to take pity on General Motors and Ford, it's that much more money into Toyota. If Toyota began competing against the South Korean and mainland Chinese car manufacturers on price alone, they can, and still earn a profit. That's no trivial accomplishment.

There's a new fad in Japan: Hand-hammered copper rice cooker. Instead of taking up to a hour to make rice, it cooks over gas in only 10 minutes because the heat is evenly distributed. (Don't worry about any toxic level of copper leaching out. Rice isn't acidic, and things which are normally added to boiling rice, such as mattake mushrooms and beans are not acidic either, so there's no danger of those things releasing acid that leaches out copper that goes into the food. Even if a small amount leaches out, the Japanese tea's tannins chelate it away, and what little there is still left is likely required by your body in its copper metabolism cycle. If there was any bugs in the water, copper kills it also, as you may recall from another chat some months ago.[That mentioned that the water must remain in the brass container for 24 hours at room temperature, but chemical reactions double with each 10 degrees celsius rise in temperature, so that when the temperature is raised from 20 degrees to 100 degrees, that's 2 to the power of 8 increase, meaning 256 times, so that what took 24 hours to kill can be accomplished in only about 10 minutes at the boiling point, even for bugs that are resistant to boiling temperature.]) How trivial is that?

Cornell University researchers in US claim that they found a new drug called nicotinamide that reduces the probability of causing Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS. Pregnant women who drink alcohol during a critical part of their fetal brain development when foresight deducing part of the brain is destroyed by alcohol.), at least in mice. The catch is that they need to be injected shortly after consuming the alcohol, and ever time alcohol is consumed. It's not something that a pregnant woman is likely to do, and any pregnant woman who wanted to save her baby wouldn't drink in the first place. It relegates this drug to a trivial research tool, but they hope to find the mechanism by which the drug prevents brain cell death and find another more permanent mean to forcibly protect fetus from their pregnant mothers.

About that charge-coupled device problem in your Sony digital camera that may smear or not work at all due to a manufacturing defect. Don't worry if it's past the warranty period when that happens. Bring it in, and they'll repair it free, until October 2, 2007. If mine breaks, I don't plan to complain and get it repaired: I plan to use it as an opportunity to purchase a better Sony digital camera.

Nanoradio AB's first-generation 20 milli-meter^2 WiFi chipset, the NRX700, is claimed to be the smallest and lowest power consuming to be made for cellular telephone and personal assistant devices. If it's so small, how about building everything needed into what look like headsets? The band that connects the two pieces together can be the battery and antenna.

On March 01, 2006 (Yes, the theme should have been sc-tech, but it's temporarily switched to "heart" for now, as in the romantic and sex one, rather than the organic heart that beats 72 times a minute at rest. For example, Elton John's first record was released by Philips Records in England on this chat date in 1968, titled "I've been Loving You", and you know that Elton just tied the knote with his long-time lover back in 2005. Elton isn't covered today, but using the sc-tech theme was preventing the coverage of several famous people for today, so here they are.)

Happy birthday to 1810: Frederic Chopin, who was born as Frederic Francois Chopin ("Fryderyk Franciszek Szopin" in Polish, although it's a mixture of two: "Fryderyk" is the original way of spelling, and it's Polish, while "Francois" designates his French root.) in the village of Zelazowa Wola, Poland to French-origin teacher father Nicholas ("Mikolaj") Chopin and Polish mother Tekla Justyna Krzyzanowska. Nicholas worked as a French teacher to Count Skarbek's manor. Although not rich, his parents were musically gifted, although his parents thought that he didn't like music, because he cried whenever his mother played the piano. That perception changed when his older sister Ludwika began teaching him how to play the piano by the time he was five years old (He also had a younger sister who died at age 14.) and his musical talent was immediately audible, creating original compositions by age six. He was quickly given professional music education from 61 years old family friend Wojciech "Adalbert" Zywny from 1816 to 1822. By age seven, he was already a famous piano player in the Polish city of Warsaw who even played before the Polish aristocracy. By 1818 at age eight, he was giving a public charity concert and his piano composition was published in a local city newspaper. By age 11 in 1821, he also performed for the Russian Czar, Alexander I, who came to Warsaw to open for the parliament. Although he was proclaimed as a child prodigy, he soon outgrew Wojciech's musical talent by 1822, so he was next taught by composer Josef Elsner and entered the Warsaw Conservatory of Music from 1826 to 1829. Both Wojciech and Josef are praised for not trying to make him conform to their way of musical compositions, but permitting him the freedom to find it himself. It was here that he was exposed to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and other famous works. At first, he performed at the local bars, which gave him exposure, and he began performing in concerts in Warsaw, before his parents raised the money to send him to Vienna in Austria in 1829. Since he was hailed as a genius in Poland, he was expecting to be hailed as a genius here also, but he received only a lukewarm reception. But what surprised him most was that the Poles were revolting against the Russian rule, and his own family won't let him return to Poland for his own safety. He had concerts in German cities of Munich and Stuttgart before he finally went to Pars, France in the autumn of 1831. He wasn't an instant hit and his delicate keyboard handling wasn't well-received at large concerts, but the high society Parisiennes of that era loved the fact that he was good mannered and good looking with the romantic touch of a man in self-exile (Fortunately for him, the Poles lost their revolution against the Russians and many other Poles fled to self-exile in France, where he was associated, while also allowing him to come in contact with other Polish greats who fled to Paris.), yet tickling their maternal instinct because he was frail from tuberculosis. Over the years, he became a music teacher for the rich Parisiennes, writing many compositions which he used to as his pedagogical works. One of the people most associated with him was the writer George Sand (July 1, 1804 - June 9, 1876. That's not *her* real name which was Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, although usually abbreviated to Aurore Dupin, a cross-dressing writer. But for her, he was just one of many prominent historic figures she seduced and had sex. You can't call it as having an affair, since it was illicit sex. You see, her father and aristocratic grandmother who owned the estate of Nohant-Vic in Berry died in 1821, and she felt constrained by her mother's supervision, so she married Baron Casimir Dudevant, but married life was constraining. At that time, Catholics weren't allowed to divorce, so she moved-out, and Casimir gave her a small stipend. Na<ve and pampered till then, she didn't realize that she can't live the luxurious life that she used to live on that stipend, so while having sex with lover and author Jules Sandeau, she began writing works for money. Her most memorable book was also her first novel "Indiana" [1832] about a sex-starved woman abused by her older husband and fooled by her seducer. But for the purpose of today's theme, let us also mention her book "Valentine" [1832]. Her 80 novels complains that women are treated unfairly, and also criticizes marriage per se, which is why French women are now more likely to have babies out of wedlock than a legitimate marriage. Although she wasn't a homosexual, besides publishing her books under a man's name, she also dressed as a man, so that she can go to the forbidden places, such as the libraries and museums, as well as the cheap pits in the theaters. She had sex with Alfred de Musset from 1833 to 1834, then with the main character of this article from 1839 to 1847, then with Alexandre Manceau from 1849 to 1965 among a long series of lovers.) Whether she was his true love or not, his most productive period coincided with the period that he was having sex with her, rather than with other women. She seduced him in the summer of 1838 and he moved to the Island of Majorca with her and her children that winter. But come the summer of 1839, his tuberculosis worsened and he was kicked-out -- out of fear of contagious transmission -- to the village of Valldemosa which was the only place which accepted him. She quickly sent him to a doctor in Marseille who quickly made him well enough that he can stay at her countr house in Nohant, where he could live comfortably, and with a piano nearby to compose his greatest works. After she broke-up with him, his tuberculosis rapidly became grave and no longer living a comfortable life, so he traveled to Britain in 1848 to perform in England and Scotland, but too sick and exhausted to compose new works. He last performed in November 1848 in London, where he dedicated it to all the Polish refugees. He went back to Paris the next year, where he died from his chronic ailment on October 17, 1849 at age 39, with close to 3,000 attending his funeral when he was buried in Le Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Happy birthday to 1917: Dinah Shore, remembered for songs such as "Dear Hearts and Gentle People", and her talk shows which made her the heart-throb for many years, although she's now forgotten, and those few who remember her remember that she was a southern accented brunette bleached blonde Jew. She was born as Frances Rose Shore in Winchester but raised in the singing capital of Nashville, both in the state of Tennessee. Although people she knew called her by her nickname -- Fanny -- when she began singing at a local night club at age 14 in 1931, by the time she began going to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, she had her own radio show titled "Our Little Cheerleader of Song", at the local radio station WSM-AM (It's a kinky name, since the first 'W' stands for "World", but it is the home of the Grand Ole Opry.) and used the song that Ethel Waters sang as her own stage name and radio show theme song, "Dinah". Since tape recorders weren't perfected in US at this time, she had her own small orchestra headed by Beasley Smith. Once she graduated with a degree in sociology in 1938, she went to New York City, where she was a starving artist for the first six months until January 1939, when she sang once for Leo Reisman's orchestra at the Strand Theater. Given one break, she sang for a short time with Peter Dean's orchestra before she sang with the Xavier Cugat Band, where her debut song was "The Breeze and I". Although they were brief jobs, at least she could eat, and it also gave her radio singing jobs. By that summer, RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Victor also offered her a contract. By 1940, NBC (National Broadcasting Company) hired her for a two months contract for The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street radio program which was a big success, that led Eddie Cantor to hire her for his radio show in 1941, which also led General Foods to sponser her radio program by 1943. (She also married George Montgomery from 1943 till their divorce in 1962, and a brief marriage to Maurice Fabian Smith from 1963 to 1964.) Getting regular exposure made her popular enough to get her own radio show, which also made 70 hit songs that earned her nine gold records such as Dear Hearts, "Blues in the Night", and "It's So Nice to Have a Man Around the House", as well as a movie-making contract with Warner Brothers. Her movies didn't become hits (But she appeared in some noteable movies such as John Denver starring "Oh God" [1977] where she appeared as herself, and George Burns was God.), but television was grabbing the audience, so she moved to television, starting in 1950 when she appeared in Bob Hope's first NBC television special. In 1951, NBC then gave her her own 15 minutes long (7:30 PM - 7:45 PM, Eastern Time) twice-a-week (Tuesday and Thursday) "The Dinah Shore Show" till 1956. She entertained without saying or doing anything controversial like Howard Stern and the rest of the current host/hostess gang, which was regarded as appropriate during that era when Communists were presumed to be everywhere. Then it became the one hour long Sunday night variety "Dina Shore Chevy Show" till 1963. (That's not "Chevy" as in the actor Chevy Chase, but the abbreviation for the Chevrolet car made by General Motors that sponsered her show. The show never won the rating game against CBS' General Electric Theater that Ronald Reagan hosted.) From 1970 to 1974, it became the 30 minutes long "Dinah's Place", and then from 1974 to 1979, it was the 90 minutes long syndicated "Dinah!" (Or were the last two titles reversed?). In the 1970's also, she was remembered as Bert Reynolds' older girlfriend. Like Lucille Ball's persistent shows that kept airing under varying circumstances, she also did "Dinah and Her New Best Friends" in 1976, then "Dinah and Friends" from 1979 to 1984, before also doing "A Conversation with Dinah" from 1989 to 1991. After that, her cancer made her too weak to continue, and she died on February 24, 1994 in Beverly Hills, California.

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Sc-tech

About that comment yesterday on Japan's war time behavior: It's really nothing compared to US. After the War, US spread deadly germs through New York City's subway to see how disease spreads. After World War II, there was antibiotics, and even though antibiotics easily cured syphilis, people were intentionally left without treatment to see how the disease progresses on its own, even though that was already a mountain of medical documentations for centuries. Even now, HIV-positive people, even pregnant women, are treated with all sorts of toxins with no medical justification for using those toxins to see what effect it has. The difference is that with Japan, it was a brief event that took place during a big War, when there was an air of desperation and the survival of Japan was in question. With US, it's a decades-long event, and instead of experimenting with anyone who can even loosely be classified as enemy soldier or enemy civilian, those experiments are still continuing with US citizens. Is it somehow alright if Americans kill Americans in the name of science?

On March 01, 2005 (For a short while, it looked as if Nintendo was heading in the direction of Sega Enterprise; down, but not yet out. When some game publishers stopped or slowed down development of GameCube (introduced since November 2001 in US) games, a top British department store chain even announced a drastic discount to get rid of their stock of GameCube machines. So it came as no surprise that Nintendo halted production of the machines and announced that the retail suggested price of $149 was going to be reduced to $99 in September 2003. But it seemed that this wasn't the death struggle that it seemed at first. The machine sale shot up 60%, and by January 2004 the game sales doubled. By this chat date in 2004, a Nintendo spokeswoman in Los Angeles announced that their stock of the machines was gone and they had to bring-in some more from elsewhere. Since then, their dual screen machine sale also shot-up to prove that their young audience don't care as much for the megahertz nor megabytes, when the games are fun. Besides, everyone from racing drivers to surgeons are praising these game machines for teaching them how to learn and refine the hand-eye coordination. Science and technology, is the theme.

2004: Tiny US laptop maker Itronix Corporation of Spokane, Washington, announced that US Air Force was also going to buy its ruggedized laptops, just like the Army. It used to be that the military developed its own electronics, but all tha stopped about 20 years ago when the developmental delays and high costs meant that their soldiers were forced to use generations-old machines for which softwares were hard to procure. Itronix is among that small company whose expensive but mil-spec laptops can take four inches of rain a hour, and -10 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 Fahrenheit, as well as glow-in-the-dark keyboard for the non-touch-typists. And it can also transparently connect to different wireless telecommunication standards, even the cellular telephone network. Yet although Itronix is making a big thing about the military sale, and Itronix caters to a select few, it still gets most of its sales from places like BellSouth and Sears, Roebuck field workers.

2004: Greek scientists headed by Stathis Gonos in Athens announced that they found a way to lower cancer's resistance to drug and radiation therapy so that the dosages can be reduced and get rid of the harmful side-effects that accompanies high dosages. When cells are under attack by infection or anti-cancer therapy, the cell produce Apolipoprotein J protein to protect itself, so they used RNA interference to prevent the protein from being expressed, so that they cannot shield themselves from the therapy and die with as little as a tenth of the normal dosage. Stathis has since partnered with University of British Columbia and Canadian company, OncoGeneX, to continue to study its effect on animals before it's tested on humans. Tough luck. Even with the use of anti-bodies to direct this toward only cancer cells, all it does is to kill the weaker cancer cells and allow the tougher cells to survive the lower dosages. Since dominant tumors produce chemicals that suppress the growth of nearby tumors, if the dominant tumor is killed and surgically removed, the suppressor chemicals also disappear and the nearby tumors grow. Meanwhile, more and more people in the developing world are relying on monocultures of plants which are just like clones. Besides eliminating strains which may have anti-cancer chemicals, these plants are selected for their cancer inducing quality: After all, cancer causes tissue to lose control and allow growth once it reaches a designated size. Yet we select rose-hip-like apple trees that produced the biggest fruits, the small wheat seed that produced the biggest grain, and the tiny maize that produced the most corn. As long as the crop is large, we don't care how vulnerable they are to infections, because we spray poisons that get rid of them, even though the same poisons are too toxic to use on humans. Is it any wonder that even children whose ancestors were able to avoid diabetes now get diabetes? Or how cancer and heart disease are killing more people than any infection? Even if we turn vegetarian (that's not nutritionally balanced; you should eat some meat or animal derived product once a week or two), we no longer eat diverse forms of wheat or tomato, some of which may have contained a chemical that cured whatever is making you sick. Since patent protection cannot be applied to an ever changing brew of unknown properties, the pharmaceutical industry advocates consumers away from the unknown, in favor of the seeds that they sell of known properties. Since researchers cannot gain fame by presenting a mixed brew of unknown objected that cures everything, they keep looking for one, and only one documentable compound that acts as a cure-all for everything. As for the farmers, they're led to believe that whole wheat made from pure-bred seeds are better, because they earn money on quantity, not the quality of infection fighting chemicals. As for us, the consumers, we mock primitive people who plant hundreds of different maize, potatoes or other produce in the same field, because it produces a diverse mixture that's not consistent in taste, size, and other qualities that we regard as more valueable than something that's preventing the primitive people from suffering cancer, like us.

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The March 1, 2004 issue of the journal, Clinical Inflectious Disease, mentions that even dead influenza vaccine is safe and effective on six months old babies with asthma or chronic cardiac and pulmonary diseases. The weakened virus is not recommended on toddlers under the age of five or on high risk toddlers because they still cause a mild disease, so those babies and toddlers were unprotected during the sensitive six months to five years of age. Now that it's known, it's a cheap shot at under $25 to protect a child. At least, as long as $25 is cheap enough for you or your government to pay. And then there is that neurotic behavior that causes parents to refuse vaccines because one in a million who get the vaccine may die, so they'd rather risk the one in 10 risk that their child will be brain-damaged, paralyzed or even dead. At least if the one in a million die, they can sue the vaccine maker or the health institution that administrated the vaccine, while they have no one to blame but themselves if their child is crippled for the rest of their lives in a one in 10 chance. The only children who don't have to take vaccines, is mybookshop, thanks to Isaac's magic.

This chat date issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases mentions that they found out that the human Yersinia pseudotuberculosis infection that took place in Finland was caused by lettuce. The symptoms are similar to appendicitis and easily misdiagnosed because it's so rare in people but common in deers, but an alarming increase in this rare disease were diagnosed in October 1998 among 38 patients. It turned out that iceberg lettuce from four farms were the source of the infection, and the reason appeared to be that they used irrigated water that contained roe deer stool. Who would have guessed that fresh lettuce can make you sick? (Wash they in soap water before consuming, like us.)

Starting on this chat date in 2004, Monsanto will ration its supply of genetically engineered cow milk producing hormone known as the recombinant bovine somatotrophin which is known by the brand name of Posilac. Only half the required amount is available, and what dairy farmers can get will cost 9% more. There's enough milk for the milk drinkers, but the lack of sterile supply of the hormone will continue for a year, so it might eventually translate to more expensive milk, cheese and butter.

Starting on this chat date in 2004, MicroSoft's case against Lindows go to trial, because MicroSoft figures that "Windows" is their copyrighted and copy-protected word that Linux users can't use. Does that mean that companies that advertise that they repair broken windows must now repair broken... indows? Or dows? Or just ows? A maid can no longer say "Sorry, I don't do Windows", any more?

For OPEC's April 1, 2004 oil cut to take effect, this chat date, March 1, 2004 is the date for contractual shipments. Else it looks as if OPEC was just kidding around.

On March 01, 2004 (Mayor Peter A. Clavelle of Burlington in the state of Vermont, US plans on having a drug purchase program that buys drugs from Canada for its town employees and families by this chat date in 2004. Located just too far away for Montrealers from the Canadian province of Quebec to drive down there in search of cheap US products, Burlington never did get many Canadian shoppers, but with US pharmaceutical companies following a strategy of manufacturing expensive drugs that must be taken day after day for as long as you live, those Burlingtoners began driving up to Canada in search of cheap Canadian drugs that were manufactured by US pharmaceutical companies. As you know, mybookshop is sympathetic to those pharmaceutical companies, because it does take $100 million to $1 billion and 10 to 20 years to get one drug approved, and the number of hit drugs that make it over the duds are so small, even though once approval is given, that's also a license for anyone else to make cheap knock-off hit drugs without having to invest all that money and time. At the same time, mybookshop is also hostile, because those same companies are also using media propaganda to reject all drugs that cannot be patent protected. If anything, a best compromise is for the government to setup a publicly funded pharmaceutical company that bring to market those unpatentable drugs. You won't see it come to fruition due to the vehement opposition from those traditional companies which will sacrifice those patients who could have been saved. What's the problem? It's the whole methodology that has become the tradition in US pharmaceutical companies. As you've followed up on mybookshop articles, you probably realized that drugs used to be based on empirical reasoning: That is, people ate some food or spice that made them feel better such as salicylate containing millipedes, it was purified, and was found that it's an anti-oxidant but it causes internal bleeding when taken in quantities that work for arthritis, so a less toxic acetyl form was made. No one really understood why it worked on headaches and arthritis alike, but as long as it worked, that was enough excuse to manufacture and sell them. Those chemical companies continued to do that while its researchers made new chemicals and tested it on themselves while universities set about finding out how it worked. But somewhere along the line, those chemical companies became pharmaceutical companies, and they stopped extracting natural drugs and synthesizing new chemicals to test them on various subjects to find new drugs, and then modifiy them to come up with better drugs. They decided that they will find out how they work and then make drugs based on that understanding, just like those university professors. The problem is that the living creature is a very complex interacting system whose cells and tissues and organs behave differently from what was theorized and will make different chemicals depending on different environmental stimulus. When one leg begins to walk, it sends those sensory informations to the other leg and stimulates that leg to walk also. When a plant leaf opens up its stomata, it does computations to determine what the optimal stomata opening size is, to take in as much carbon dioxide as possible while minimizing water loss. Even a group of five neurons in an insect perform amazing feats at amazing speeds that can rival the best supercomputers that occupy tennis courts. Nature doesn't ask why something work, it only selects anything that does the required job. That's how chemical companies used to work, but no more. Because the pharmaceutical companies only treat the end results on how everything works, they only want to make drugs that treat those end symptoms and not the cause, so you have to keep taking drugs for as long as you live. How does that translates to your ailments? Why eliminate the infection that causes acid reflux when you can get people to buy drugs that must be taken whenever you get acid reflux? Why cure the infection that leads to sensitive teeth when you can get people to buy toothpaste that must be used every day? Why acknowledge that sexual dysfunction is caused by underlying blood vessel related disease like diabetes, when you can get people to buy expensive Viagra for the dysfunction and insulin for diabetes after the conditions became bad enough that insulin is required? Diabetes itself isn't caused by only the loss of those insulin making cells, nor is it only caused by an infection that leads to the body trying to destroy the infection and ending up destroying its insulin making capability. The information is readily available in any classic medical textbook [at least mine mention all the causes] but because of the targetted end result approach used by pharmaceutical companies, they develop one drug for each of the symptoms, instead of empirically finding something that works on the root problem. It increases their profit margin because they can sell dozens of drugs where one drug will do, and the mass media is more than happy to tell people that to deviate from that prescribed medicine means death. Echinacea is a good example that mybookshop has been complaining for years. It must not be taken in pills nor tea because over half the active ingredients are not water soluble, even though the synergistic properties mean that the polar components are useless without the non-polar components. But just about all the Echinacea that's sold by the regular pharmaceutical companies ignore that simple fact, on top of the traditional argument that it's the root that contains the active ingredients, which is why even the tincture forms only contain 5% root, while the rest is flower, stem, leaf and everything else. Those gullible researchers who don't know anything about Echinacea then take this pill or tincture and then say that it only worked a bit, and the media then reports that Echinacea only worked a bit. Is it any wonder that people are becoming suspicious about all those AIDS drugs that must be taken, forever? And why is Tylenol still legal over the counter when it was banned as such so many years ago in Europe due to its toxic nature? 600 people are killed every year from excess consumption that causes liver failure, which is certainly greater than the number of people who were killed by Ford Explorer and Firestone tires. It's certain greater than the number of people who died from SARS in US. It's certainly greater than so many other things, yet the media refuses to point out the killer for what it is, and hospitals continue to prescribe expensive Tylenol over the cheap and safe aspirin whose chances of causing brain damage has been exaggerated out of proportion for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry.

Aside from that argument, that sort of went tangential to the story, FDA is under pressure from the pharmaceutical companies to prevent those towns from buying the drugs from Canada, so commissioner Mark McClellan is making claims that Canadian drugs are generic knock-offs that are manufactured in some far away places whose efficacy is not known, without giving any verifiable examples to back it up, even while US pharmaceutical companies -- which are certainly located in a far away place called US -- are threatening to cut-off any amount beyond that which are normally consumed by Canadians. With so many excess billions of dollars siphoned-off for home security, there's nothing left for the elderly who are so dependent on these drugs until 2006 when the Medicare drug law is supposed to kick-in. If George W. Bush gets booted out of office in 2004, then he can claim that he couldn't follow-through on the required paperworks to help the elderly. If he gets re-elected, then it doesn't matter because he can't be re-elected back into office in 2008. The loser in all this political bickering is the drug-dependent patients. There is a stop-gap measure to lower cost: In regard to the Johnson & Johnson article of a month or two ago, it was mentioned that middle-men companies buy these drugs in bulk and then repackage them for sale to hospitals and the individual pharmacy stores. So cut out the middle-men and let the states run a co-op so that they can buy bulk drugs directly from the pharmaceutical companies themselves. Like to have some more helpful free consultations? All drugs that can only be taken externally must have a big, red, "X" on the label. Those that can be taken both externally or internally must have a yellow "B". Those for internal use only get a green "I". The rough order of magnitude in daily dosage should be similarly expressed by color-coded numbers. All prescription-only drugs must come in triangular dispensers. For the rest, pay-up. These standardized knowledge should be made available to the public so that the patients and their visitors can easily tell at a distance if the tired doctor or the nurse made a mistake or did it with malice.

That's mostly chit-chat and wild rambling. It's really futile to waste time researching the subject because the pharmaceutical industry has squadrons of expensive lawyers who can pulverize anyone who question their business practices. So your spouse or parent died from the alarming increase in cancer that's happening throughout the world. It's because you're not eating cheap and cancer-fighting fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Instead, you were seduced by those fanciful media commercials on the processed foods that come in value-added packaged boxes and cans. Even those supermarket fruits, nuts, and vegetables are not the fresh produce that contain cancer-fighters, but months-old produce that's shipped from who-knows-where with no cancer-fighters, because the cancer-fighters disappear after only a few days as the living produce themselves use them up as they strive to survive in the refrigerated containers. It's not as if this is news, but the media only covers the news that cancer, asthma and other diseases are increasing around the world. The media also don't like to mention that refrigeration and preservation technology has simply become too good for their own good, because farmers aren't paying their paychecks; it's those packaged goods and packaged medicine sellers who are. The only reason why mybookshop bothers mentioning it, is because mybookshop is mad. Willing to trash the manufacturing industry in favor of the cheap and natural approach doesn't sell anything that makes a dime, let alone a penny. The article for today was supposed to be a very mild story on the birth of Venus by Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi whose works are said to epitomize the whole Renaissance that those Arabian science and medicine brought to Europe, but it turned out that he was already covered under his assumed name of Sandro Botticelli on his death for the May 17, 2001 chat date. The reason for starting the Sandro article was because he was a prot,g, of the Medici family whose remains are currently being dug out and examined to find out how they lived and what caused them to die. That work is still in progress so it's too premature to mention. He was also considered an ideal candidate because after his death, he became an unknown artist, and mybookshop likes to talk about those poor chaps. He became well-known in the 19th century when the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain rediscovered him, but that's not enough to justify a rewrite unless some more revealing information comes out on the birth of Venus, whom you recall was originally an amphibian creature from beyond the stars who taught people all about planting seeds and laws to govern people. The legend talked about how he will come back through that wormhole to rule Earth with his mighty neutronium sheathed space ship. That led mybookshop to speculate that it needs an antigravity drive to move all that mass on Earth, while wondering if there are ways of making indestructible sensors on such space ships that can respond to outside stimulus, while a 100 megaton thermonuclear bomb explodes over it. That silly line isn't good enough for prime time, so that's the end for today. An attempt to write something on the Winton Motor Carriage Company had no far reaching conclusion and was also omitted.)

Sorry. No article for today.

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China's 863 program is supposed to find an ecologically acceptable mean to remove the chewing gum that messes up Beijing's Tiananmen Square with offer to pay $120,000 equivalent to get them removed. Although 2 billion chunks/sticks are consumed a year, the Square itself had 600,000 wads left over despite the $2.50 to $6 fine for anyone caught spitting gum in public. Why not just make it illegal to sell the real gum based chewing gum and only permit the synthetic gum made of soft plastic like the Japanese chewing gum? The real gum does form a big mess that sticks like glue to hair (especially Ted's blonde hair), leaky pipes, streets and the back of my shoes, but those Japanese gum made from synthetic plastic doesn't stick to anything, no matter how I tried. Say, there's a 10-pack Ultraman Tiga gum that's sold in Chinese and Korean stores. I wonder if those are made of the typical Japanese gum? If it is, then China should only allow Ultraman Tiga gum. That should make life a bit easier, so it's a gain... at least until the light begins to blink to warn that there's no more time left.

On March 01, 2003 (Just one, and the theme is opposite of last year, so it's "gain".)

1872: US President Ulysses S. Grant signs the bill creating the first US national park out of Yellowstone. As is always the rule, the natives have known about the geysers for hundreds or thousands of years for as long as they lived in the area, but their opinions don't count as far as western historians are concerned and are relegated to the section under legends and mythologies. As far as US history books are concerned, the story of the Yellowstone Park began with John Colter (born in 1775 near Staunton, Virginia, died 1813 near New Haven, Missouri) a farmer and fur trapper who was chosen by Lewis and Clark in 1804 for the trek to explore the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean. On the trip back home in 1806, he obtained permission to leave the expedition with Forrest Hancock and Joseph Dickson to trap beaver on the Yellowstone River (so named for the high yellow rock cliffs on the northern part of the Park which led the Minnetaree tribes to call the river "Mitsi a da zi" or "Yellow rock river" which the French beaver trappers called "Yellow Stone") for most of 1807, not caring if he was tresspassing and stealing from natives, until he found that out the hard way in 1808 when the Blackfeet natives captured him and he eventually escaped, brought back stories of water-pillar geysers and boiling cauldrons of mud, got out of the shack he used to live in 1809, married in 1810 and died in 1813. Most people didn't believe his stories and just called it "Colter's Hell", although the Lewis and Clarks expedition did confirm that he was in the Yellowstone River site as he claimed. Several later expeditions such as the Folsom-Cook and Washburn-Langford-Doane expeditions appeared to collaborate and confirm them, but they were just words which couldn't begin to describe what were seen. Finally in 1871, geologist Ferdinand Hayden brought along one of the earlier photographer William Jackson to capture the shape in black and white and artist Thomas Moran for the color rendition to show how "a picture is worth a thousand words". To prevent this site from being destroyed by those who exploit, the Congress set aside 494,434 hectares which read as follows

An Act to set apart a certain Tract of Land lying near the Head-waters of the Yellowstone River as a public Park. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, lying near the head-waters of the Yellowstone river, and described as follows, to wit, commencing at the junction of Gardiner's river with the Yellowstone river, and running east to the meridian passing ten miles to the eastward of the most eastern point of Yellowstone lake; thence south along said meridian to the parallel of latitude passing ten miles south of the most southern point of Yellowstone lake; thence west along said parallel to the meridian passing fifteen miles west of the most western point of Madison lake; thence north along said meridian to the latitude of the junction of the Yellowstone and Gardiner's rivers; thence east to the place of beginning, is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States, and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people; and all persons who shall locate or settle upon or occupy the same, or any part thereof, except as hereinafter provided, shall be considered trespassers and removed there from.

SECTION 2. That said public park shall be under the exclusive control of the Secretary of the Interior, whose duty it shall be, as soon as practicable, to make and publish such rules and regulations as he may deem necessary or proper for the care and management of the same. Such regulations shall provide for the preservation, from injury or spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their retention in their natural conditions. The secretary may in his discreation, grant leases for building purposes for terms not exceeding ten years, of small parcels or ground; at such places in said park as shall require the erection of buildings for the accommodation of visitors; all of the proceeds of said leases, and all other revenues that may be derived from any source connected with said park, to be expended under his direction in the management of the same, and the construction of roads and bridle-paths therein. He shall provide against the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit. He shall also cause all persons trespassing upon the same after the passage of this act to be removed therefrom, and generally shall be authorized to take all such measures as shall be necessary or proper to fully carry out the objects and purposes of this act.

that Ulysses signed into law as the Yellowstone Act of 1872 on this chat date, which was a surprise in that era when everyone thought that destruction of nature and its exploitation was progress, but then the place was so far away and hard to access that not many congressmen thought it was worth exploiting for financial gain. It was also designated as an International Biosphere Reserve on October 26, 1976 and then a World Heritage Site on September 8, 1978.

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There's yet another one of those holographic storage on a five inch CD-size disc. It's yet another one of those one terabyte storage, CD/DVD compatible, one Gbps transfer (so that it can be directly connected to a high speed optical fiber network as main storage or to record off the web), write-once-read-mostly made by another unknown-till-now company by the name of Optware. Where only one bit was stored, Optware's polarized collinear holography splits that one beam into one million so that it stores one million bits in the same spot. Optware is a tiny company with only $3.5 million in market capitalization, located on the 7th floor of the Nissho #13 building just north of the railway in Kanagawa, Japan which was incorporated on December 24, 1999 (Christmas Eve). The concept of the polarized collinear holography technology was first shown in August 2000. The one major difference from all the other claimants to the one gigabyte optical disc by unknowns in Romania and other unbelieveable sources who claimed that they can get it to the market in a year, like about two years ago, is this company's president, Hideyoshi Horimai. Aside from being the inventor of polarized collinear holography, he worked for 13 years in Sony to make the Mini-Disc and other data storage units. And the other good part is that he's not a graduate from those supposedly "elite" Japanese universities like Tokyo U and Waseda U which kept churning out the morons and idiots who put Japan into its current deathly stagnant state for the past decade and who are continuing to keep Japan in the near-death status quo. Thank goodness for his going to Toyohashi University of Technology. As with so many other holographic storage device wanna-bees, Optware promise you a rose garden... eh, that is, their write-once optical disc before this September and then a rewriteable one later on, and then even do an IPO by 2005. Hopefully, they won't begin singing "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden..." but at least they have some creditials to back up their credibility: Sony work and a no-name university. Let's hope that he makes it where others failed, so that the new coalition of Blu-ray Disc group based DVD companies are eliminated and also eliminate all those idiot politicians and financial morons who went to Tokyo U and Waseda U, not to mention elimination of those incompetent universities. (Quite unrelated, but the reason why those 10 Japanese, US and Korean companies formed the blue laser based DVD specification was because they were being eliminated out of the regular CD and DVD market by the cheap Chinese CD and DVD machines.)

On March 01, 2002 (Elimination or loss again. Today is the 1962 celebration of the original K-mart, and that same K-mart recently went bankrupt in the year 2002 so that was a loss worthy of mention here, but the stories about the collapse of K-mart isn't quite complete and the information in Business Week, Fortune, Newsweek and others are still not yet processed so that article was not covered. It's a pity, since K-mart was a source of those small books on Sailor Moon, City Hunter, Dragon Ball, Capricious Orange Road, Dr. Slump, Uruseiyatsura, Dai's Adventure, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and so many other books translated from Japanese. In fact, those and many more Japanese comic books were also available in another store, but that was translated into Chinese, and that store also went under a couple of years ago, as did another store which had the Japanese video discs as translated into Chinese. But every translation lost a touch of the original stories, although the animations made from the books also lost a lot as well. For example, Ray-Earth lost a lot of the food-jokes when it was animated, but Dragon Ball didn't lose any of that comic's food-jokes. Now, how is "Sakura: Card-Caster" doing? It's made by the same people who wrote Ray-Earth.)

1780: Pennsylvania became the first US state to abolish slavery, assuming you were a new-born baby, else you had to serve until you were 28 years old and all of your strength began to wear out. Pennsylvania already had African slaves by 1639, except they were called Guineas, because they were slaves from the Guinea Coast of Africa, brought there by the Dutch, the Finns and the Swedish masters. William Penn was born on October 24, 1644 in London, England to father Admiral Sir William Penn. Yet despite this very high social status, he was very friendly with the much despised Quakers (founded by Leicestershire weaver, George Fox, circa 1647) who were opposed to the British love of war, complex ritualized life and cumbersome dress codes. As already discussed previously, King Charles II owed 16,000 pounds so he agreed to "give" land that Charles supposedly owned because the natives, being non-whites, had no rights as humans. As already mentioned before, the Charter of Pennsylvania was signed on March 4, 1681 and proclaimed on April 2, 1681, general assembly on December 4, 1682, adopted the Great Law on December 7, 1682 to give humanitarian code of ethic. Yet sarcastically, by 1684 came the ship Isabella with 150 African slaves from the West Indies, to be owned by the Quaker masters who grew rich off of their labor. Although the natives who lived on the land had no concept of owning their land, so that it was easy to buy the lands exceptionally cheap, they nonetheless paid for most of the lands by 1784, as opposed to stealing, lying and massacring as was the practice in all other colonies of the time. While this was a land for the Quakers, in under a century, a third of the colonists were from Germany and a quarter was from Ireland and Scotland. While the Germans were not fond of slavery, the English, the Scottish, the Irish and the Welsh were fond of African slaves so that there were 4,000 slaves by 1730, despite that "Great Law", which turned into a law for only the very pale skinned -- the Germans and even the Swedes were not considered of that very pale skinned group, as Benjamin Franklin himself mentioned, but the influx of French, Dutch, Jews and other groups led to a tolerance of various Europeans. With the increased tolerance of various Europeans came the hostility toward slaves who were mistreated for being darker skinned -- not to mention that slave owners had an unfair advantage in being able to produce things cheaper. The Quakers who were enthusiastic slave owners were also turning into hostile abolitionists, forming the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775 to help escaped slaves. By the time the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 was made, there were about 8,000 slaves (often their mothers were natives and fathers from Africa, so it's not biologically correct to refer to them as African-Americans, although their offsprings were dark-skinned like Africans). It also required all slaves to be registered like humans and any slave charged with crirme were tried in courts, rather than by their masters as with other humans. On March 29, 1788, it was amended so that immigrants who came to Pennsylvania with slaves had to free the slaves, while slaves who had not yet reached the age of 28 could not be separated from their parents. But just because abolitionists existed didn't mean that they were not hypocrits. After all, among the prominent members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society included George Washington, whom with 188 slaves in Fairfax County, Virginia was one of the biggest slave owner in his county, and he refused to free any slave while he was alive. Another member was Benjamin Franklin who was a racist by current thinking who wrote "CONCERNING THE INCREASE OF MANKIND, PEOPLING OF COUNTRIES, ETC." (1751) in Pennsylvania and it went in part; "... 24. Which leads me to add one Remark, that the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny; America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons are excepted, who, with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind." before he decided to withdraw this part from later editions. Also incidentally, from 1782 to 1790, Virginia will also free 10,000 slaves, not because they felt that it was the moral thing to do, but because they were too old or sick to work and hence was a drain on manpower and finances, so that they were left to the elements to die, so that it was the most immoral and despicable way of freeing slaves.

Happy birthday to 1946: Lana Wood, born as Svetlana Gurdin to Russian parents in Santa Rosa, California, best remembered for the James Bond 007 flick; "Diamonds are Forever", although she got that role after appearing naked in an issue of Playboy. Svetlana was born to father Nicholas Zacharenko who was born in Vladovostok but who grew up in the city of Vancouver in the province of British Columnbia in Canada, but Nicholas decided to change it to a more American name like Gurdin, so that Svetlana's last name became Gudin. Her career on the screen was at age four as an extra in "Happy Land" (1943). She also appeared in "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947) and others as a child, but unlike many child actresses who lose it as they grow up, she also appeared with James Dean in "Rebel Without A Cause" (1955). Then on the day "The Searchers" (1956) was shot, someone asked her Russian mother what name she want her daughter, Natasha, by a previous marriage to have, and her ex-ballerina mother said "I guess... Wood", and that's how Natasha became Natalie Wood, and Svetlana also lost her Russian heritage completely. Since then, Svetlana has appeared in many more well known movies such as "West Side Story" (1961), "Gypsy" (1963), "Love With the Proper Stranger" (1963) and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" (1969). But while filming "Brainstorm" (1981), her half-sister 43 years old Natalie drowned in a yachting accident year Catalina island.

Happy birthday to 1954: Catherine Bach, born in Warren, Ohio, actress best remembered as Daisey Duke in the adventure-comedy "Dukes of Hazzard" (1979 - 1985) next to John Schneider and Toom Wopat. She first appeared in "Strange New World" (1975) and other small parts before she hit it big in this show, although a lot of that popularity came from the loss of her clothings and showing more of her skin. Since then she has appeared in one-shot shows such as "Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes" and "The Magic of David Copperfield" (1981) and movie such as "Cannonball Run II" (1983) and "Rage & Honor" (1992).

Rest In Peace to 1991: Edwin "Din" H. Land, inventor of the now obsolete Polaroid camera and the still popular polarized sunglasses, dead at age 81. Edwin was born on May 7, 1909 in Bridgeport, Connecticut to scrap-metal dealer Harry and Martha Land. Edwin was a fan of Robert Williams Wood (1868 - 1955) who contributed much to optics and photography. After Edwin went to Norwich Free Academy, he went to Harvard College, but left in 1926 to ccontinue his study in the New York library. Among the first contribution he made was for the Iceland spar which produces two images when rotated due to polarization at right angles to each other. The Vikings first realized that this can be used to detect the circular polarization of the Sun on a cloud covered day by using two such crystals at right angle and looking at the clouds to find out where the Sun is, so that they can navigate by Sun even when they can't see it. (According to Viking legends, they may also have discovered crystals which can record voice and other things which are still fabled fantasies of ghost stories, just like the Northwest passage from Europe to Asia that they found but which did not exist by the time the British tried to find it.). Edwin, however didn't know about the Viking discoveries, but he did read about Erasmus Bartholin (1625 - 1698) who rediscovered them and William Nicol (1768 - 1851) who began making big and expensive but crude polarizing filters out of the crystals. While in the public library, Edwin read that in 1852, Dr. William Bird Herapath found that dogs given quinine produced small crystals in their urine, which when placed on a sheet parallel to each other allowed light to pass through, but when two such sheets were perpendicular, then no light passed through. Using this knowledge, Edwin found out that by using small iodoquinine sulphate, he can align them in the same direction by placing it in a strong magnetic field before he set them so that they don't move and make the Nicol polarizer but make it smaller, cheaper and in larger amount -- what the Japanese and then the other Asians will be criticized of doing the same thing with electronics and other fields of discovery in the 20th century. After Edwin patented it in 1929, with his Harvard physics teacher George Wheelwright III, he made the Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in 1932. By 1937, he made the Polaroid Corporation in Boston to make this cheap polarizing glasses, which Joseph Mallory of Polaroid used to make the vectograph by forming a stereoscopic image. While Edwin thought that this was great for preventing glares from car light fitted with polarizers at one angle and the drivers wearing polarizers set at perpendicular to them, the car makers did not like the fact that the polarizers cut down on light so that strong lights were needed, but the vectograph went on to become popular in the 1950's for use with the 3-D movies of the era. (His 1944 inspiration for making the instant photography camera, followed by the instant 8 mm movie and how the video camera wiped it out was already mentioned.) While Edwin has certainly made many things of better resolution, cheaper and higher quality, he would mention the source of his inventions in conversation but often left it out in writing like a typical "American" who tend to claim all the credits to himself without acknowledging the sources and be chided like the Japanese who honestly acknowledge their sources. Edwin stepped down as president of his company in 1982 and died on this chat date. His loss was a loss to US, although digital photography, digital-VHS, DVD and others made some of what Edwin did obsolete.

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On March 01, 2001: (Elimination or loss of one kind or another.)

1811: Egyptian king Muhammad Ali oversees ceremonial execution of 500 Mamelukes (also "Mamluks" meaning "slave") to celebrate the end of the rule by these "slaves". The Mamelukes were originally boys from Central Asia who were taken to Egypt as slaves by the Muslem rulers of Egypt. In Egypt, they were trained as soldiers and used by the Abbasid caliphs in the 9th century. While they were becoming powerful enough to be lords, the turning point came in the 12th century. The ruler Al Salih Ayyub had a Mameluke wife by the name of Shaggar ad Durr, but Al Salih Ayyub died before he had any heir in 1250 AD, so Shaggar, even though she was a Mameluke, decided to be the ruler, and the Mameluke lords supported her, at least for the first 80 days before they decided that Aybak al Turkumani was a better ruler and that she should marry him. Except Aybak was content with his other wives and didn't want to marry her, but he did rule Egypt. While she managed to force him to divorce his favorite wife in the hope that he may then decide to marry her, he decided to marry another woman, so she had him murdered. The Mameluke lords were furious at what she did and eventually beat her to death. From this point on, the Mamelukes ("slaves") ruled Egypt and Syria. These original Mamelukes composed main of boys taken from Turkey and Asia were called the Bahris Mamelukes and they ruled from 1250 to 1382. Among the most powerful of the Mameluke ruler of that era was the Turkish slave, Baybars, born in 1223 and who defeated the Mongolian horde at the Battle of Ayn Jalut (also spelt "Ain Jalut") on September 3, 1260. Then on the pretext of giving the good news to the ruler, he slayed him to become the fourth ruler himself. He also spent a great deal of time defending his land against the Christian Crusaders before he died in 1277 at Damascus, when he accidentally drunk some poison. Since the Mamelukes rank was always augumented by fresh slaves from wherever they were kidnapped as children, there were soon Mamelukes taken here from Greece, Tartar, Turkey and also the Circassians (so called because they came from Caucasus). Since they were warriors who were from different places, they would spend their time killing each other. The Circassian Mamelukes were especially dangerous because not only did they kill other Mamelukes from other places, but they had a thirst for raping and killing women, regardless of where the women were from. Eliminating them by sending another group of Mameluke soldiers was futile, since the fresh soldiers would then run amuck and rampage on their own. Since the Circassians were in the majority, they ruled, but the rulers did not last longer than seven years on the average, each ending in a violent death. They were called the Burjis Mamelukes and they ruled from 1382 to 1517, and it was the most bloodiest and evil period of the Mamelukes. Then in 1517, the Ottoman Turks invaded Cairo in Egypt. The Circassian Mamelukes, who used swords and shields, were no match for the technologically superior artilleries and the Turks' own slave soldiers, the Janissaries. But the Turkish ruler, Selim, allowed the Mamelukes to keep their lands and even their own private armies. But as time passed, the Ottoman empire weakened, so that one Mameluke, Ali Bey, felt that he was powerful enough to proclaim independence in 1769, although he was eliminated in 1772. Then Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1796 and defeated the Mamelukes. Into this was born Muhammad Ali around 1769 who rose from the rank of a regular soldier. By 1799, he was in command of the Turkish army to try to defeat Napoleon in Egypt, unsuccessfully. In 1805, he rose to the rank of a pasha, which basically allowed him to make schools or irrigation canals independent of the Ottoman Turkish ruler. So it was that on this chat date, he decided to eliminate the remaining Mameluke leaders. By 1820, he was conquering Sudan and was on a conquering binge until the combined British, French and Russian forces defeated his force at Navarino in 1827. Still, by 1839, he also tried to attack the Ottoman ruler before he lost France's support and accepted the Ottoman ruler's proposal to make him the hereditary governor of Egypt -- something similar to a hereditary ruler under the Ottoman empire. He retired from his governorship in 1848 so that his son can take over and then died in 1849.

1996: New toll-free 888 area code introduced in North America. The old toll-free 800 number was starting to be used-up as more businesses began using it and as others began reserving their current telephone number as future 800 numbers, but also because it was changed from a business number to a number which even a mother can set-up, so that her far-away college boys can call her toll-free from school. AT&T launched an 888 education media blitz in September 1995 so that the public will know that the 888 area code is a toll-free number. It was also followed on March 13, 1996 when AT&T celebrated the "AT&T Toll-Free Day". These were so popular as far as the service users were concerned that it became necessary to add 877 as another toll-free area code in early 1998. And soon there will come a time when the toll-free and the regular area codes will become mixed and mixed-up so that you may find that you were paying for a call which you thought was free. As an interrim solution, they should have just added one more number so that 1-2-(any area code)-number becomes a toll-free call, while 1-9-(any area code)-number becomes a caller-pay call and 1-8-(any area code)-number is a cellular telephone number.

Happy birthday to 1953: Ron Howard, born in Duncan, Oklahoma to actors Rance and Jean Howard, best known for his role in "Happy Days". Ron moved to Hollywood in 1959 and first appeared on television "Playhouse 90". By 1960, he played Opie Taylor in "The Andy Griffith show" (1960 - 1968). By 1973, he played Steve Bollander in "American Graffiti", and next year, in "Happy Days", where he played Richie Cunningham till 1980 when he signed-up with NBC abruptly left the sitcom while it was very popular -- about the time that he suddenly began losing his hair and began looking like an old man, so that he had to constantly wear a hat or anything else to hide his head. He went on to shoot the television movie "Skyward" with Bette Davis, and then "Nightshift" (1982). He also shot the "risque" Disney company, Touchstone's debut movie "Splash" (1984) with Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah, which incidentally had a fanastic beginning part in which Darryl swam in the water like she can breath water, although she didn't move as graceful and as fast as a fish, which could easily have been done by dragging her with a piano wire. Then came "Cocoon" (1985), in which old folks kill the sleeping extraterrestrials and extraterrestrials who were trying to rescue them decide to reward the old folks for killing their friends. While Ron had some flops, he made a successful comeback with the failed lunar mission "Apollo 13" (1995) with a great simulation of how real astronauts behave when gravity is eliminated.

Rest In Peace to 1984: Jackie Coogan, born as John Leslie Coogan on October 14, 1914 in Los Angeles, California and actor best known as Uncle Fester in the original television horror sitcom "Addams Family" (1964 - 1966), dead at age 69 from heart failure in Santa Monica, California. Long before Shirley Temple made a name for herself, four years old John was used by Charlie Chaplin in his various movies and became one of the highest paid actors, with credits such as "A Day's Pleasure" (1919), "The Kid" (1921), "Little Robinson Crusoe" (1924), "Tom Sawyer" (1930) and "Huckleberry Finn" (1931). He was able to command half-a-million dollars just by switching to another studio. As his career began to lose steam at age 21, he tried to live high on the hog on the millions of dollars that he earned, and which was in the hand of his business manager and stepfather. But it turned out that his stepfather and his mother who were giving John a very meager allowance had spent the millions of dollars on their own, so John sued, but the court said that while John earned the money, he had no right to the millions of dollars because he earned it as a child and had no legal right to it, resulting in his getting under $127,000 to start his life with his beautiful actress wife, Betty Garble. When the public heard about this huge loss, it caused an outrage, resulting in the "Child Actors' Bill", which is also known as "The Coogan Bill" which require that the money be placed in a trust fund until the child is old enough to use it. While John -- that "Uncle Fester" -- managed to marry Betty Grable for a short while, his movie career consisted of mostly minor and support roles, such as "Million Dollar Legs" (1939) starring Betty Grable and "Kilroy Was Here" (1947).

From 2000:

On March 01, 2000

1932: 20 months old Charles Lindbergh Jr is kidnapped at East Amwell. Charles A. Lindbergh had flown across the Atlantic ocean in 1927 and laid the ground for the era of a transoceanic airplane trip. He had a son, Charles Jr, and was planning to go to his parents' home as always, but on this particular night, Charles Jr had a cold, so they stayed home, along with the nurse, Betty Gow and housekeepers. Except for them and his parents, no one else knew where the child was. Yet between 8 to 10 PM when the nurse was not present, the kidnapper went up to his second floor nursery and left a note demanding $50,000 in ransom (that's enough money to build a big and gorgeous house fit for the famous Charles Sr to live in). There was a hand-made ladder and a chisel nearby, but any other evidence was trampled and destroyed by the horde of inexperienced police and the media which came. It was soon followed by scores of letters, each claiming to be from the kidnapper, as well as letters of sympathy and even psychics who claim to know where the child is. Among several negotiators, Dr. John Condon seemed to be in contact with the real kidnapper. In one phone conversation, he talked with the kidnapper whom John thought had either a Scandinavian or a Germanic accent, as well as an Italian in the background. Eventually, he paid the ransom to the kidnapper in traceable gold certificates. During their one hour conversation, the kidnapper confirmed that he was Scandinavian and that there were six of them. The kidnapper met with John several times, but it never resulted in the return of the baby. On May 12, 1932, a truck driver found the remains of the child in the woods near Hopewell Princeton road, just a few miles from Charles Sr's home and dead from a skull fracture in February or March. Two years later, the certificates led the police to Richard Bruno Hauptmann who also had $14,000 of the ransom money in his garage. John identified him as the one whom he paid the ransom to, and the hand-made ladder was found to be made from his attic floor. Everyone wanted the illegal German immigrant with a criminal record dead. Richard insisted that his German business partner, Isidor Fisch, a man who owed him money gave him the shoe-box of money. Isidor Fisch himself died abroad. The trial lasted from January 2, 1935 to February 13. While Richard's wife insisted that Richard was at home when the kidnapping occurred, the jurors didn't believe their story. And even though Richard was promised that he will only go to prison if he confesses, he insisted that he was innocent and was eventually executed on April 3, 1936. It was only after he was executed that people in general began to think maybe he was innocent after all, or why won't he confess and stay alive? And what of the others involved, and the inside knowledge the kidnapper had? And speaking of Germans who confess,

1950: Klaus Fuchs is sentenced to 14 years for atom spying in Britain. Klaus was a communist refugee German physicist in Britain who worked on the Manhattan project and who gave the atom bomb secret to Russia (It's now known that many Americans gave the secret of both the atom and hydrogen bombs to Russia in a belief that no one country should be given the power to bully all other countries, but most of them were never caught.). The US intercepted a Russian code in 1944, but it was only in 1949 that it was decoded and FBI got onto it in September. By January 27, 1950, Klaus confessed to British intelligence MI5 and said he passed the secret to Russian spy, Harry Gold. Based on this knowledge, the US Joint Intelligence committee claimed that the Russians will use this secret to make their own atom bombs and atom bomb US as soon as possible, so that the US must build the next more powerful hydrogen bomb over the protest of 12 top US physicists of February 5. By February 24, the US Joing Chiefs of Staff also demand the hydrogen bomb. Because Klaus confessed, he got a 14 year sentence, of which he served nine years and then allowed to go to communist East Germany to teach physics. (Julius Rosenberg and wife Ethel Rosenberg were executed for not confessing that they spied for Russia.) By April 7, the US National Security Council also claimed that Russia will attack US as soon as it had enough atom bombs (document NSC-68). North Korea invades South Korea on June 25, and US president Harry S. Truman confirms that the US is thinking of using atom bomb in Korea on November 30, 1950. It was much later that another US president decided that giving away nuclear secrets to the world will make nuclear bombs less common. Now, speaking of hydrogen bomb,

1954: Just before dawn at 6:45 AM, the 23 crewmen of the Japanese fishing vessel Dai-go Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon number five Circle. Remember the chat on Piper Maru?) in the Pacific ocean were awestruck when they saw the Sun apparently rising to the west, rather than east, while the ocean became even more brighter than day. Then seven to eight minutes later, a thundering sound and a fireball in the horizon. Unknown to the crewmen, US decided to explode their 12 - 17 megaton "Bravo" fission-fusion-fission thermonuclear bomb 85 miles away which was designed to produce the maximum amount of lethal radioactive fallouts possible, even though meteorological data showed that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction towards inhabited islands of Rongelap and Utrik, and even though people far beyond the so-called "safety zone" will be affected. The replacement of cryogenic unit by solid lithium-6 deutride in the fusion segment proved so successful that it had twice the expected explosive power. Then in a seemingly unrelated incidence some hours later, sticky white ash began snowing and tenaciously clinging to skin, hair, clothing, all over the ship for three hours. At one point, the white ash snowed so much that it was hard to see ahead and avoid breathing the ash. By night fall, they were all sick, but the journey home was still two weeks away on March 14. It began with nausea and vomiting uncontrollably with the accompanying loss of appetite, skin irritation and inflammation. Soon, those skin irritations turned into sores, while hair began to fall off and the skin turned dark brown. Pus began to discharge from body cavities and internal organs began to fail. Even after they reached Japan, US refused to reveal the composition of the fallout to Japanese medical authorities, so that no appropriate treatment can be devised. (It also didn't help that US occupation force destroyed Japanese medical equipments which could have detected or studied radioactivity.) US also refused to accept responsibility for its actions, refused to transmit request for analysis of the white ash and downplayed the sickness of the crewmen, while making round-about accusations that the Japanese ship was spying for the Russians. Not realizing that the nine tons of fish which the ship brought back was highly radioactivity, it was sold and eaten before they found out that it registered an astounding 60,000 counts on a geiger counter. Eventually, Aikichi Kuboyama died after six months of tortuous pain on September 23, 1954. For a while, the US government denied everything, insisting that the radioactivity in the fish was negligible and safe to eat by the Japanese (but US also refused to accept any fish with the slightest radioactivity, hence setting a double standard), and even though hundreds of its own non-white citizens in the Marshall islands also suffered radiation sickness from this hyper-radioactive bomb. Fearing radiation sickness from fish caught in the Pacific, the Japanese fishing industry suffers untold tens of millions of dollars of damage as all fish were dumped and the fishing industry grinded to a halt while fish continued to come out radioactive from the oceans for 10 months, even though the radioactivity in the ocean water itself fell rapidly. The good thing was that they found out a principle by which algae eat the radioactive compounds and is concentrated as fishes above the food chain eat it. The ship was sold to Tokyo University of Fisheries in 1956 and was abandoned a decade later on Tokyo bay's "Dream Island", literally a big heap of incinerated garbage mixed with sterile soil excavated while making the foundations of skyscrapers. A letter to a newspaper renewed interest in the ship in 1968 and donations poured in to save the ship, resulting in the Lucky Dragon museum near Tokyo bay in 1976. Now, most treatments and effects of radiation on people are taken from the atom bombing and this hydrogen bomb victims, giving a false sense of survivability; the unique, traditional Japanese diet of soy sauce, tofu, seaweeds, vegetables and fish inherently made the Japanese resist radioactivity better than any other people. As for US, US was exploding nuclear devices in the Marshall Islands since 1946 without warning when or where they were exploding, regardless of the prevailing wind direction and strength, even though this area known as Micronesia was not legally entrusted to the US by the United Nations until 1947; so US was atom-blasting a sovereign nation without declaring war. Some US reporters were also cynically chiding the Lucky Dragon ship for being unlucky, despite the ship's name, as if luck had anything to do with the incidence. They apparently didn't care that an unknown number of Californians also ate radioactive fish caught by US fishing boats, but that information was quickly classified and no further detail is available. And speaking of nuclear snow,

1985: Pentagon accepts the theory that a nuclear war may cause a nuclear winter if the war began during the summer (a nuclear autumn will precipitate if the war began in winter). Digging backward into the papers, Alan Robock seems to have mentioned it first in the British science journal, Nature 310 in 1984. The nuclear winter assumes that the world's forests and jungles will be set on fire or that dust from the bombs will darken the sky for months. It won't happen if large number of small neutron cluster bombs are detonated instead of the dirty fission-fusion-fission bombs. Also, any hardened site can be constantly barraged by neutron bombs more often than by with hydrogen bombs, which can be detonated on the same spot more often than once a hour. Some way can always be found to maintain a nuclear arsenal without inviting any nuclear winter or even autumn. Speaking of some way can always be found,

Happy birthday to 1909: David Niven (real name James David Graham Niven) of Kirriemuir, Scotland who found out that he had Lou Gehrig's Disease in 1982 and died in 1983 (If you remember, Rich Little did the voice for James when James couldn't speak his scripts near the end of his life so that the movie can be completed.). And speaking of another actor,

Happy birthday to 1935: Robert Conrad (real name Conrad Robert Falk) of Chicago, actor who appeared in Wild Wild West. By now, you probably guessed that the theme wasn't nuclear bombs, but just the "speaking of" used to connect one historic event to the next historic event.

Search Catharine Bach, Ron Howard, Jackie Coogan, David Niven, Frederic Chopin, Dinah Shore, Harry Belafonte

Listing Catharine Bach, Ron Howard, Jackie Coogan, David Niven, Frederic Chopin, Dinah Shore, Harry Belafonte

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