ALKALYN

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DANGEROUS ISOTOPE

Dangerous Nuclear Device -The very latest from the Islamic Republic

Ahmedinejad and the Iranians have devised a new type of device that has the White House in a spin.

Using Y type Iron, a highly radioactive isotope that can produce a device of hitherto unimagined destructive power, combining both the ability to contaminate and also having an enormous explosive potential, the regime's scientists are believed to be in the advanced stages of developing such a weapon.

There is some good news for the current incumbent of the white house and that is that GW may have a higher than normal resistance to the effects of the material.

BIT OF FUN

Found this Geography game on the Lufthansa Website - keeps you on you toes regarding European cities

GYPSIES IN CAMPS - AGAIN

What are the Italians up to? Mr Mussolinini did it in the madness that took hold of parts of Europe in the middle of the last century. What is next?

Why don't we just make lots of camps ready for the next lot, never mind what they are, but just in case. Like the frog in a gradually warming pan we are becoming inured to changes that will result in us becoming fully paid up members of the Fascisti. The frog cooked eventually and we are well on the way to becoming a state that treats its minorities in unacceptable ways.

A PLEA TO JEWISH AMERICANS

You do have power in shaping world events, true it is much less than the total control of the media and the banking system that the conspiracy theorists would have us believe, but the Jewish lobbies in America have enormous influence, certainly well beyond what one would expect from a minority that numbers no more than two percent of the population.

American Jews can help create positive outcomes for Israel and the Middle East by words and actions. The image of the USA also could also do with a bit of buffing up.

In my opinion you should be using your influence on Israeli and American politicians to engage in dialogues with the perceived enemies of Israel. Ahmedinejad is not the ogre that he is made out to be, demonizing such people and the Iranian Nation by association only makes future normalization processes more difficult and reduces the possibility of a secure future for Israel and its people. Iranians are not violent people, anything but, and the majority would like better relations with the West, and would, in my estimation be happy to do business with Israel once they see attempts to restore a measure of justice to the Palestinian populations under their control.

Do not allow yourselves to be seduced by short term considerations or promises of easy military fixes. Look at a map of the Middle East There are dozens of states surrounding Israel, Keeping them all backward, poor and militarily incapable is just not feasible, it has worked for Iraq but at painful cost to Israel's allies and millions of innocent Iraqis.

Iran is a bridge that has not yet been burned, please, please don't let the crazies make things worse.

'Building bridges is much better than erecting barriers'. - DE April 2nd 2008

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A MOVABLE FEAST
Easter can take place as early as 22nd of March and as late as 25th of April.

Dating of Easter is based on a Jewish lunar calendar and is derived from the feast of Passover. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox.

This year is the earliest Easter for a long long time. You will have to be pretty old to have experience the last one (1913 was the last time). Nobody living is likely to see the next one that is this early for it will take place in AD 2228

Even less frequent than this year's event is an earlier Easter - March 22nd - the last occurrence was in 1818 and the next one will be in 2285 -- DE 3rd March 2008

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PANDEMICS, ISLAMIC RADICALISM AND MEMES

The development and proliferation of Nazism in 1930s Germany bears striking similarities to pandemics and epidemics. There is little doubt that self-replicating phenomena have common factors.

There are several ways of combating threats resulting from religious extremism and other doctrines, one that I believe could yield results is to adopt an epidemiological approach.

We are taking about Memes. These are very real phenomena and they can perhaps be viewed as similar to biological and computer viruses. Just as attempts to limit computer virus proliferation benefit from approaches developed by methodologies created by experts from the Medical profession; e.g. Doll and others, so can the propagation of memes. Multiple approaches, especially those derived from studies of the 1918 and 1957 flue pandemics can be used to limit, slow down and even halt proliferation.

Opportunistic bacteria accompanied the 1918 pandemic and probably caused many of the fatalities and damage. The immune response and resulting cytokine storm (Link) in younger persons caused more deaths than the virus. If we look at what happened in the wake of Sept 11th 2001 then along comes the equivalemt of an immune responses and and the WoT (War on Terror) and other opportunistic phenomena causing considerably more damage than the attacks and infection itself..... Uncanny similarities..

Tackling medical plagues does bring in the real experts but what can happen when there is a terrorist attrocity is that the people capable of directly tackling the roots of the problem are swept aside and are replaced by populist mouths offering revenge and an inevitable worsening of the situation by adding more of what caused the attrocity in the first place. DE March 1st 2008

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MORE CLEVER ITALIANS

Another interesting experimenter and pioneer was an English born inventer of Italian parentage: Sebastian De Ferranti, his main claim to fame was in percieving the advantages of using Alternating Current over Direct current for the transmission of electrical power. At the age of fourteen, he defeated Sir Humphrey Davy in debate in the Royal Society. Davy, like Thomas Edison was an advocate of DC. Sebastian de Ferranti went on to found the British company Ferranti Ltd.

Both Ferranti and Marconi founded highly successful companies in the technology fields, both of the companies were wrecked by technology illiterate accountants who were conned by other smarter bean counters. Sir Derek Alun-Jones, managing director of Ferranti took the company further away from its core business and bought into an arms dealership that looked good on paper but had no real assets. He was the victim of a $368 million fraud involving bogus contracts at International Signal and Control Ltd. The chief at Marconi, Lord Simpson did an equally daft purchase of American companies that had no hope of doing anything other than dragging Marconi down. Both companies were leaders in several fields when they were at their peak -- DE October 27 2007

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BAM BAMBAM - BAM BAM IRAN

The War Party in the US and France are still beating the drum. I for one am worried that they will have their day. Would the generals say no to Dick and George? That is the only thing standing in the way of the Loonicons.

Here in Europe they are talking about a sanctions regime that is BOUND to make the Iranians abandon their cooperation with the IAEA and possibly withdraw altogether from the NPT. Messieurs Kouchner and Sarkozy may not be posturing when they talk abut an attack being an appropriate response to failing to halt uranium enrichment. Such a withdrawal would be a gift to the War Party Their whoops and chanting will be echoing round the globe. The argument for action would then be seen to be insuperable.

What I find most troubling is that so many of the people in the US think tanks are so focussed on a military/intelligence based approach that they can overlook the presense of large numbers elephants in their rooms, great bloody herds of them, defecating, trumpeting and leaving muddy footprints in the expensive carpets in the chambers and conference halls of their 'Centers'.

If only the experts in Brookings, Cato and other similar establishments could really know the people and situations of the Iranian people. Read Robert Byron, Edward Granville Brown, Jean Chardin and Richard N. Frye. A people who have an abhorrance of violence' (Robert Byron) Whose supreme leader has issued a Fatwa against weapons of Mass Destruction, who when they had WMDs used against them refused to retalliate in kind and who have a record of non-interference in other countries that goes back for almst two millenia. Leave then alone, I say. Who knows what the response would be to an unprovoked attack on their country. They are the only country in the Middle East whose people are, in the main pro-American. They are a patient people, make carpets that take up to a decade to complete, they play chess. You really do not want to annoy them without a cause.

Please stop deliberately misrepresenting their current president, believing in dodgy 'evidence' and return the elephants to the jungle where they belong. DE October 03 2007

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Self Fulfilling prophecies
Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that the assertions that Sadam and Al Quaida were in cahoots are quite risible, but now, a few years on, we have an indigenous Terror Organisation; people born and bred in Baghdad calling themselves AlQuaida who go around merrily attacking the 'infidel invader'.

Is it not likely that similar irresponsible rubbish about Iran arming the Taliban may one day come to pass? not to mention the unsusubstantiated narrative that Anti-American elements in Iran are producing penetrator weapons. If the Iranians were to decide to get active in aiding the insurgencies I am convinced that there would be several orders of magnitude more casualties among the coalition. DE August 11th 2007

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Is Walid Junblatt still the ArchDruid?
I find the news that Rupert Murdoch has added The Wall Street Journal to his media portfolio worrying to say the least. On the other hand another of his enterprises is one of my favourites and always good for a giggle.

I regularly check up on what our cousins on the other side of the pond are being fed by the Fox 'News' channel. No ill will felt to their viewers only pity, it is surely garbage of the worst kind.

A while back when I felt that I needed some amusement I switched over to Fox and sure enough, Mr Murdoch's finest were living up to their comic expectations; an ex military 'expert' on the Middle East was giving the lowdown on the various ethnic groupings, to be found in the Lebanon, he listed the Sunni and Shia and in his short list mentioned the DRUIDS - Could he be referring to the Druze?

Sometimes it is not so funny when it sinks in just how dangerous the people producing the entertainme-oops sorry News on Fox really are. We in the UK have the example of the Times of London, this was bought by Rupert in 1981. It took a year or before the good journos started leaving and the reporting became a little more than a reflection of the great leader's attitudes and politics. As for using the paper to further his business interests, I worked for London Weekend Television when he was trying to gain control of the organisation, we were the target for a campaign of dis and misinformation from the Times even though he had only owned the organ for only a short time. In the UK our experience of assurances of editorial independence from the 'Rupert' leads me at least to believe that they are of the consistency of pie crusts - be warned.

An interesting nugget; Murdoch had three conversations with Tony Blair in the nine days before the Iraq invasion.

Here in Britain we sometimes refer to the man as the 'Dirty Digger' - a reference to his antipodean roots and the sex scandal based rag - 'News of the World' which gave him a foothold in the UK newspaper market. His power and influence are definitely not to be underestimated, our new Prime Minister Gordon Brown was very quick to pay Rupert a visit when it became obvious that his Tonyness was on the way out. DE 11th August 2007

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More on Alexander Bell and the invention of the telephone.
The first demonstrations of speech at a distance took place in Italy, The land where where Galvani and Volta carried out the first experiments in electric current generation.

To me, by far the more interesting of the notable two Italian experimenters was Innocenzo Manzetti. It was he who constructed a 'Speaking Telegraph'. This was a means to give a voice to an automaton he built. The flute playing automaton had over 500 parts and could roll its eyes. The notes produced by the flute could also be controlled from an organ type keyboard. Manzetti, almost certainly was the first to use electrically powered remote speech transmission system. He had many many other achievements and like Bell was not at all interested in business or making money from his inventions. The Bell company driving force was his father-in-law and others who used his name and good lawyers to monopolise telephony in the USA.

Like Bell he would, very probably be astounded at the controversy raging about who 'invented' the telephone. He would also have been disappointed that Meucci was attempting to patent a device that incorporated his ideas. Manzetti's achievements were widely publicised around the world, in fact Alexander Bell, his father and grandfather visited Sr. Manzetti in Italy. Sr. Meucci, the other Italian telephone pioneer was given details of the Manzetti invention by Bell himself. Meucci's original speech transmission systems were mechanical

The Bell patent is obviously designed to promote ideas from Bells current work; tone transmissions and not to gain a business advantage, although that is clearly what Bell's father-in-law intended, for it was he who submitted the patent when Bell himself was out of the country. The Bell patent does, in addition to the main section dealing with speech synthesis using tones of different frequencies, mention an active (using a power source) system that was never ever going to be a practical device. The section dealing with the device seems to have been inserted in the patent as an afterthought - or by someone else? DE 1st August 2007

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Scottish Ruffian or Telephone Pioneer?

Last night I was watching an amusing Television programme QI. The presenter asked the question - "Who invented the telephone?"

The reply Alexander Graham Bell was given - NO WRONG shrieked the quizmaster for it was he, the otherwise wonderful Stephen Fry....."he was at the time a young engineer working for Western Electric and he learned of the work of a poor Italian, a Mr Meucci and promptly nicked the idea".

Bell was actually a Professor of Vocal Physiology and the co-founder of the National Geographic Magazine and the Journal 'Science'. Among the many inventions and contributions were facilitating the teaching a profoundly deaf-blind girl to communicate and achieving the world water speed record in his patented hydrofoil. He also experimented with thermal solar panels and tested out an idea of laying down magnetic information on rotating disks.

His patent makes no mention of inventing the telephone only "Improvements to Telegraphy" He did also seem to have a grasp of the basics of speech synthesis, in fact the patent is more to do with the use of sound sources carrying harmonics - or 'overtones' as he called them. He did devise a method of producing voice-like sounds but not an intelligible speech. Towards the end of the patent there is a description of Bell's active device. Bell had been aware of Manzetti and Meucci's achievements and unlike Meucci was not attempting to patent the fruits of someone else's work.

It is almost certain that there were at least two pioneers who demonstrated devices which could carry speech electrically over a distance but Professor Bell was a brilliant development technician. Bell and his assistant Thames A. Watson made an analogue device which used a resistive device (liquid based) to modulate the flow of current and a signal of an order of magnitude greater than the simple magnet and inductor type of Mr Meucci who expanded on the work of the earlier pioneer, Innocenzo Manzetti.

It is a sad comment on the IEEE that they were unable to make a distinction between the active devices (using a source of power which was controlled by sound pressure) produced by Bell, Gray, Reis and others and the simple generator/transducer demonstrations of the earlier generation. - DE 29th July 2007

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Pit Bulls and Staffordshire Bulls - Am I going mad or has the traditional Staffordshire Bull Terrier been transfected with the pit bull DNA and if so what has happened to the traditional Staffs terrier. To me it looks as if the Pit Bull people have hijacked the breed to get round the ban on Pit Bulls in the UK.

The victim of this sorry tail is a noble breed, but then it has always seemed to me that the competitive dog breeders have often been shown to have a vandalistic streak. DE 28th February 2007

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I used to drive small and fuel efficient cars because as a Green I was saving the planet, now my main concern is that blood is being spilled to keep me on the road. I sometimes check to see that the liquid pouring in to my tank is not red and sticky. - DE 18th Dec 2006