Friends

The world has failed at protecting tigers in the wild, bringing an animal that is a symbol for many cultures and religions to "the verge of extinction," a top United Nations wildlife official said Monday.

Just 20 years ago there were 100,000 tigers in Asia, but now only 3,200 remain in the wild, according to Willem Wijnstekers, the secretary general of the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES.

He called on countries to come up with strategies and co-operate with international agencies such as Interpol to end poaching and illegal trade in tiger products.

"We must admit that we have failed miserably," Wijnstekers said at the two-week conference in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. "Although the tiger has been prized throughout history … it is now literally on the verge of extinction."

Tigers are poached for their skins and parts of their bodies are prized for decoration and traditional medicines.

mindstalk

zarq

• Chile's earthquake, it turns out, was a boon to Québec's lumber industry by knocking out its Southern Hemisphere competitor.


• Will Labour gets its chance to transform the House of Lords into an elected Senate, I wonder.


• The tuna is on the verge of extinction, thanks to overfishing particularly but not only in the Mediterranean.


• It turns out that the earthquake in Chile helped the Chilean military regain some of the prestige lost under Pinochet.


• The executive director of the UNAIDS program is pushing for the worldwide legalization of homosexuality in order to help treat HIV/AIDS.


• Um, OK. Apparently the British government feared that the Boy Scouts might link up with the Hitler Youth. Was that really possible, despite certain shared philosophical commonalities?


• The Moscow Times reflects on the divisive role of history in the former Soviet Union, with Russians trying to assimilate their Communist past and others like Ukrainians rejecting it as evil.


• A widow writes about how her husband clung to life despite a hospital bill of more than six hundred thousand dollars US. What price life?


• It looks likeGoogle China is going to shut down.


• In the United Kingdom, music downloads are helping to boost the income of the music industry.


• Surprise: a study reveals that readers of news online do not want to have to pay for the privilege.


• The Canadian and American dollars are moving towards parity, again.

Last November Stacey Lynn found herself in Florida pondering whether to buy a condominium in Naples or one in nearby Sarasota. The Toronto woman ended up buying both.

"The prices were truly amazing, especially when you factor in the exchange rate," said Lynn, explaining her splurge.

Except this wasn't for a pair of jeans. Cross-border shopping has never been this good for Canadians.

No snow. No nasty bidding wars. And condominiums for the price of a parking space in downtown Toronto.

Canadians jaded by high prices at home are increasingly looking beyond our borders as a much more muscular loonie – and a sense that prices are bottoming out south of the border – has us flexing new-found financial brawn.

Not since the Japanese started snapping up real estate in Manhattan have a group of foreign buyers been as prevalent in U.S. markets.

"There is certainly a greater confidence out there with Canadians. It's not just economic. There is a sense that we are players on the world stage, whether it's our banking institutions or more recently at the Olympics," said Philip McKernan, author of South of 49: The Canadian Guide to Buying Residential Real Estate in the United States.

Developers will be hard at work courting Canadian dollars this week as families descend on Florida, Arizona and other sun destinations for the March break.

According to a U.S.-based National Association of Realtors study of international home buying activity, Canadians were the No. 1 foreign purchasers of property in the United States in 2009. And we have also been looking farther afield in Central America and the Caribbean.

"Canadians are absolutely dumbfounded when they see the prices here," said Arnold Porter, the Canadian owner of Phoenix-based realty firm Arizona For Canadians. "You have this rare perfect storm in the United States where you have low interest rates, still falling prices and a Canadian dollar that keeps going up."

[. . .]

Lynn's 500-square-foot condominium would have sold for about $169,000 three years ago, according to Florida Home Finders.

Her second property was purchased in nearby Sarasota, a five-minute drive from Siesta Beach, considered one of the best beaches in America. Lynn purchased a 900 sq. ft. condo for $86,000. She estimates it would have cost her more than $200,000 at the peak.

A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.

The Solar System is surrounded by thousands of stars, but until recently it wasn't at all clear where they were all heading.

In 1997, however, astronomers published the Hipparcos Catalogue giving detailed position and velocity measurements of some 100,000 stars in our neighbourhood, all gathered by the European Space Agency's Hipparcos spacecraft. It's fair to say that the Hipparcos data has revolutionised our understanding of the 'hood.

In particular, this data allowed astronomers to work out which stars we'd been closer to in the past and which we will meet in the future. It turns out that 156 stars fall into this category and that the Sun has a close encounter with another star (meaning an approach within 1 parsec) every 2 million years or so.

In 2007, however, the Hipparcos data was revised and other measurements of star velocities have since become available. How do these numbers change the figures?

Today, Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg gives us the answer. He's combined the Hipparcos data with several new databases and found an additional nine stars that have either had a close encounter with the Sun or are going to.

But he's also made a spectacular prediction. The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is poor so nobody has really been sure about what's going to happen.

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he's found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.

That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious consequences. Such an approach would send an almighty shower of comets into the Solar System which will force us to keep our heads down for a while. And a probability of 86 percent is about as close to certainty as this kind of data can get.

[I]ts proper motion, distance, and radial velocity[3] indicate that it will approach within 1.1 light years (70,000 AU) from Earth within 1.4 million years, based on the latest Hipparcos data. At closest approach it will be a first-magnitude star about as bright as Antares. The proper motion of this star is very small for its distance, meaning it is traveling nearly directly in our line of sight; compare for example with Arcturus.

In a time interval of ±10 million years from the present, Gliese 710 is the star whose combination of mass and close approach distance will cause the greatest gravitational perturbation of our solar system. Specifically, it has the potential to perturb the Oort cloud enough to send a shower of comets into the inner solar system, possibly causing an impact event. However, recent dynamic models by García-Sánchez, et al. indicate that the net increase in cratering rate due to the passage of Gliese 710 will be no more than 5%. They estimate that the closest approach will happen in 1,360,000 years when the star will approach within 0.337 ± 0.177 pc (1.1 ly) of the Sun.[4]

Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registers symbolics.com, the internet’s first domain name. The market for these unique addresses would not heat up for years, but this click heard ’round the world would eventually provide just about anyone a place in cyberspace to call their own.

Owning your own domain is nothing to brag about anymore, while trying to get one that resembles your name or something personally meaningful has become an exercise in futility. But a quarter of a century ago, when Symbolics took the first step, there was barely an internet — it was years before the world wide web and graphical web browsers.

[. . .]

Nobody seemed in a terrible hurry to get a domain; only five were registered in all of 1985. As you’d expect, the first 100 are packed with computer companies. Apple registered its namesake, the 64th domain, on Feb 19, 1987. Microsoft waited until 1991 to buy theirs.

IBM and Sun registered on the same March day in 1986, the same year Intel and AMD joined the cool crowd. That was 14 months ahead of even Cisco Systems, whose tag line in the future would be: “Empowering the Internet generation.”

No, none of these obvious suspects were first, or particularly early adopters. In fairness, Symbolics was not exactly chopped liver; it was a member of the legendary Route 128 corridor of high-tech firms that fueled the Massachusetts Miracle (no, not the election of Scott Brown). That remarkable stretch of economic power catapulted Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis into a dismal 1988 Democratic presidential candidacy, and then exile to obscurity — which is similar to Symbolics’ trajectory.

But the company’s place in history is well-deserved. Symbolics was conceived at the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, the renown academic incubator. One employee, a former member of the lab, created the LISP machine — the world’s first workstation, before that term was even invented.

Symbolics was best-known for developing what was thought at the time to be the best computing platform for developing AI software. This was during a lush, Darpa-funded renaissance for the sexy-sounding, yet broadly-defined technology. Others know Symbolics for its software, which, among other things, was used to create some scenes in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

By 1985 Symbolics was marketing its fifth-generation 3600 series of LISP workstations and, in a era bedazzled by the prospects for AI, was riding high. Things then turned south. Born between two AI winters, Symbolics went into a freefall: Founders were fired, buyers panicked, real estate investments turned bad and the inexorable march of the PC trampled it into near oblivion.

http://www.orneryboy.com/index.php?comicID=405

• BAGnewsNotes, a group blog featuring the talents of Alan Chin, Nina Berman, and John Lucaites, analyzes news photos for their hidden symbolisms. The look at the sexist framing of Nancy Pelosi in a recent shot as a freak-show hysteric is classic.


• Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond covers an "eclectic range of technology topics." His observations about the bizarre pro-Saakashvili Russian invasion hoax in Georgia is interesting.


• I don't know why I didn't link to czalex's blog before now, but it's now on my blogroll. It's an interesting blog examining Belarus and Russia. His commentary on Belarus' very weak bargaining position re: Russia on gas transit and other issues is worth reading.

The Vatican's campaign to defend the Pope's reputation and his resolve to combat clergy abuse of minors followed acknowledgment by the Munich archdiocese that it had transferred a suspected pedophile priest to community work while Benedict was archbishop there in the early 1980s.

Benedict is also under fire for a 2001 church directive he wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.

Germany's justice minister has blamed the directive for what she called a "wall of silence" preventing prosecution.

But Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Holy See's so-called prosecutor for clergy sex abuse cases, decried what he called "false and defamatory" contentions that Benedict had promoted a "policy of cover-up."

At the Vatican, rules on handling sexual abuse were "never understood as a ban on making a complaint to civil authorities," Scicluna told the church-affiliated Italian daily Avvenire.

But Irish bishops have said the document was widely taken to mean they shouldn't go to police.

Ireland was the first country in Europe to confront the church's worldwide custom of shielding pedophile priests from the law and public scandal. Now that legacy of suppressed childhood horror is being confronted elsewhere, and victims of abuse are finally breaking social taboos and confronting the clergy to face its demons.

The recent spread of claims into the Netherlands, Austria and Italy has analysts and churchmen wondering how deep the scandal runs, which nation will be touched next.

"You have to presume that the cover-up of abuse exists everywhere, to one extent or another," said David Quinn, director of a Christian think-tank, the Iona Institute, that seeks to promote family values in Ireland.

Quinn noted that stories of systemic physical, sexual and emotional abuse circulated privately in Irish society for decades, but only moved above-ground in the mid-1990s when a former altar boy and an orphanage survivor went public with lawsuits and exposés of how priests and nuns tormented them with impunity.

"A lot comes down to: When does that first victim gather the courage to come forward into the spotlight?" Quinn said. "It seems to take that trigger event, the lone voice who says what so many kept silent so long. That's basically happening now in Germany."

One of the most remarkable examples of fanaticism is found in a small Danish sect, whose principle was excellent. They desired to secure eternal salvation for their brethren; but the consequences of the principle were peculiar. They knew that all infants which die unbaptised are damned, and that those which are so fortunate as to die immediately after baptism enjoy eternal glory. They therefore proceeded to kill all the newly-baptised boys and girls that they could find. No doubt this was a way of securing for them the highest conceivable happiness and preserving them from the sin and misery of this life. But these charitable folk forgot that it is not lawful to do a little evil that a great good may follow; that they had no right to the lives of these children; that the majority of parents are carnal enough to prefer to keep their children rather than see them slain in order to enter paradise; and that the magistrate has to punish homicide, even when it is done with a good intention.