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Nigerian Witchfinder Speaks Out

January 11, 2009 /

“The Nigerian witchfinder who featured so prominently in the documentary on witch children has spoken about the situation and she comes out of her corner fighting. It is a long (and self-serving) interview but here are some highlights:

Helen Ukpabio is the founder of Liberty Gospel Church. She is noted for her preaching which focuses on delivering people from witchcraft, but ever since the documentary on how children branded witches by pastors in Akwa Ibom are maltreated, the evangelist has been at the centre of the storm following allegation that her movies encourage the stigmatisation of witches.

Ukpabio: End of the Wicked came out in 1999. It is surprising that nine years after, somebody is having a problem with a film that has delivered a lot of families. The story line of End of the Wicked has nothing to do with children. The film simply says if a child is greedy – the type that says give me this, give me that, give me puff-puff, akara or sweet in school, he or she could be easily contaminated with witchcraft. So, saying that the film branded children witches, I didn’t see the people that the film branded witches. Rather, we saw children who were greedy and were contaminated by other children who were witches in the school. That is what the film did. It is worrisome that people can be carried away just because of one wizard. Itauma is a wizard and is trying to preserve the posterity of witches, such that in the near future, Akwa Ibom will become useless.
So, if he says that the film branded children witches, I don’t know about that. Is it people that the film branded witches that are in his orphanage that has suddenly turned into home for witchcraft children? He has been running that thing as orphanage but suddenly, because the United Kingdom government voted so much money to fight child abuse over the problem that the Congolese government had with children, he decided to tap into it.”

(via Damn Data:Cabinet of Wonders)

(Related: Stepping Stones Nigeria)

Pelicans Fall Out of sky from Mexico to Ore.

January 10, 2009 /

“Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say. Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people’s yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.

Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast. “One pelican actually hit a car in Los Angeles,” said Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildrescue, a bird-rescue operation. “One pelican hit a boat in Monterey. While some of the symptoms resemble those associated with domoic-acid poisoning — an ocean toxin that sometimes affects sea birds and mammals — other symptoms do not. Domoic acid also apparently has not been found in significant amounts offshore, although more tests are needed.

Rescuers are wondering whether the illness is caused by a virus, or even by contaminants washed into the ocean after recent fires across Southern California. Many of the birds also have swollen feet.”

(via The Seattle Times)

Shoe tree mystery defeats £265,000 investigation

January 10, 2009 /

Shoe tree mystery defeats £265,000 investigation

All I know is that the shoes hanging in my neighborhood mark gang territory…

“For 30 years the branches of a tree on the busy A40 have been bedecked by dozens of pairs of shoes, many hanging from their laces, tied neatly. But a four-year project, funded by the National Lottery to discover why the shoes are dangled, has borne no fruit. The shoe tree, between High Wycombe and Stokenchurch, Buckinghamshire, is currently decorated with around 50 pairs of shoes, ranging from tattered working boots to smart looking women’s slip-ons.

More than £265,000 pounds of heritage lottery funding was granted to The Chilterns Woodlands Project to help provide a definitive answer – but just rumour and legend continue to live on. Some say the shoe dangling ritual, which began in the 1970s, has pagan origins and has just continued over the years. Others believe the shoes were originally thrown up as a witchcraft ritual to put a hex on unfortunate souls. Local David Holmes, 45, said: “There are so many stories about why the shoes appear in the branches.”

(via Telegraph)

Rejected Star Wars Product Designs

January 10, 2009 /

I want this one:

Star Wars Sun Shield

(via Once Upon a Geek)

Pharmaceutical Love Potion: Not Yet…

January 9, 2009 /

“For those of you perplexed by love’s elusiveness, take heart: Science is on the case. But even if researchers can turn love into peer-reviewed literature, they might not be able to bottle it. “People think we’re going to get a love potion, and that’s nonsense,” said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University evolutionary anthropologist. “I don’t think they understand how complex the brain is, and what a powerful role experience plays.”

Fisher’s comments were prompted by an essay, entitled “Love: Neuroscience reveals all” and published Wednesday in Nature, on emerging research into those four little letters that make the world go round. This research shows how a “biochemical chain of events,” as essay author and Emory University neurobiologist Larry Young calls it, produces neurological patterns associated with subjective experiences described as love. (If that sounds overly technical, it’s meant to: Identifying brain patterns is just one step in explaining how they become thoughts and feelings.)

Studies on the more-or-less monogamous prairie vole, for example, suggest that a neurotransmitter called oxytocin is important to mate bonding. Oxytocin interacts with another transmitter, pleasure-inducing dopamine. In humans, brain regions associated with dopamine are activated in mothers looking at pictures of their children, and lovers at each other — and, perhaps instructively, in drug addicts taking heroin or cocaine.

Also, a gene associated with paternal care and long-term bonding in prairie voles led to the identification of a human gene variant that correlates loosely with the ability of men to form caring, stable relationships. To Young, all this means that science may soon treat lovelessness as easily as it now treats depression and anxiety. “Drugs that manipulate brain systems at whim to enhance or diminish our love for another may not be far away,” he writes. Not so fast, said Fisher.”

(via Wired)

(See also: “Love spray being developed by scientists” via The Telegraph)

Worlds Largest Sand Carpet and Intriguing Sand Art

January 9, 2009 /

http://www.lifeinthefastlane.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/largest_sand_carpet_2sfw.jpg

“When one thinks of sand art, sand castles are what often comes to mind, but Tibetan Buddhist monks have long designed magnificent mandalas out of colored sand, for which Iranian artists have put a new spin to — famous for their traditional Persian rugs, a group of artists have taken it to a whole new level by creating the world’s largest sand carpet. The unique 39,400 square foot (12,000 sq. meter) world record carpet was created by 25 visual artists made entirely of 70 types of colorful sand found on the country’s southern island seashores of Hormuz, widely known for its red soil, to create the ‘Persian Gulf’ sand carpet.”

(via Life In The Fast Lane)

How The City Hurts Your Brain

January 9, 2009 /

“The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. “The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

(via Boston.com)

Songs From the Sea: Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words

January 3, 2009 /

“In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water. The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’

Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.

Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins. Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Jean-Francois Champollion and Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning.”

(via Red Orbit)

(CymaScope’s site)

Burglar Scared Off by Man Dressed as Thor

January 3, 2009 /

thor

“A builder scared off a house-breaker by running at him dressed as the Norse god Thor. The terrified intruder leapt from a first floor window to escape Torvald Alexander, who was dressed as the Norse god of thunder in a red cape and silver helmet and breastplate. Mr Alexander had just returned from a New Year’s Eve fancy dress party when he discovered the man in his home in Inverleith, Edinburgh.

He said he acted instinctively to chase the intruder away, and believed his costume may have added impact. Mr Alexander, 39, said: “We were both startled but then the instant reaction was that I ran at him and he just jumped straight out of the window. “I think I would be quite scared if someone looking almost like a gladiator ran at them.”

(via Metro. Thanks DJ!)

Amazing Snowflakes

January 3, 2009 /

amazing snowflakes 9

“The snowflakes’ pictures are captured by Kenneth G. Libbrecht using a specially designed snowflake photomicroscope. Kenneth Libbrecht is a professor of physics at Caltech. His recent research has focused on the properties of ice crystals, particularly the structure of snowflakes.”

(via Zuza Fun)

(SnowCrystals.com)

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