Mutant Monkey Flowers And Triffids

1. A new species of monkey flower has been discovered on the bank of a stream in Scotland. It is the offspring of two foreign plant species which typically produce only sterile hybrids.
2. Dr. Mario Vallejo-Marin of the University of Stirling has documented the first examples of these hybrid monkey flowers that actually show full fertility.
3. Dr. Vallejo-Marin has named this species Mimulus peregrinus, a name which translates as 'the wanderer'.

Can anyone read these words - especially the name of this new species - and not be concerned for the future of Great Britain?
Fertile hybrids of alien species - in fact, a plant called the wanderer - can bode little but ill for the island nations of the UK.

When will the British government admit to its citizens that these "monkey flowers" pose a clear and present danger to them?
Will the British government be able to protect the vast numbers of visitors currently headed for their shores for the quadrennial Olympic games?

We'll monitor this species and this situation and report back here when there is more information. Until then, stocking up on sea water can't be a mistake.


Posted by Listener 43

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A 5-sigma CERNtainty Level

1. Scientists at the LHC at CERN have announced the near-certain detection of what appears to be a Higgs boson.
2. An American team had announced that they had completely not ruled out the existence of the Higgs boson only days before the CERN team.
3. The CERN scientists are quick to caution us all that these are preliminary results, and they want to go over the numbers and be sure of what they've done before the tell us they've really found it.

So what they're saying is that there's only a on in 3.5 millions chance that this is a statistical fluke. Of course, this is after about seven million experiments, so take that with the grain of NaCl that seems appropriate to your blood pressure.
Here we are, watching the Americans try to steal the thunder of what they expected CERN to announce by announcing that they hadn't ruled out the possibility of what CERN had told them to expect. That was followed by CERN announcing that they had probably seen what the American team hadn't at all ruled out by their experiments, but please don't hold us to anything yet - it's pretty likely we've seen something that's very much like what we're seeking, but until we've crossed every "7" and dotted every "i" we're not going to be pinned down.

It's basically what I expected - more science drama in the style of a British tabloid or perhaps that fabulous TV show, TMZ.

Five sigma? Bah.

Posted by Procrustes 17

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Finally conCERNed About Facts
Still Playing The unCERNtainty Card
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Results Are Still UnCERNtain
CERNs Them Right! 

Now It's A Tax?!?!

I'm afraid I have not words capable of expressing the disgust and dismay rattling back and forth in my brain at the utter chicanery practiced by all three branches of the federal government upon its constituents (which should read bosses, but seems to read as bank accounts these days).
"There is no way this can be construed as a tax," said our fearless leader, president 0bama.
"The individual mandate cannot stand under the commerce clause, but this is allowed as a tax," says our supreme court.

Good Lord, it's as though there is no understanding of the concept of limited government left in DC.

Throw them all out! A pox on all their houses! I despair for liberty and justice for any.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

Successful SETI Experiment!

1. SETI recently performed an experiment in the use of VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) for detecting extra-terrestrial life.
2. Using this VLBI system, SETI examined 20 hours of observational data for a distant red dwarf star and its attendant planet(s) looking for evidence of artificially produced radio signals.
3. SETI reports finding no such signals. SETI also reports that the experiment was a success.

In what sense is a failure to find what they sought a success?
When will SETI and their quasi-governmental overlords release the actual data - including the radio signals deemed not to be from extraterrestrial intelligences - for the rest of us to listen to?
When will SETI realize that we aren't all sheep and idiots - that we can tell the difference between success and failure?
What actual signals were received, and why aren't they telling us?

We'll continue to monitor the situation and report back when we have more information.

Posted by Listener 43

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CERNs Them Right!

1. Our friends at CERN have now confirmed that neutrinos don't achieve faster than light speeds.
2. Their friends at a variety of other research organizations have also confirmed that fact.
3. In fact, their friends have helped to identify some of the various problems with CERN's initial experiment which led to the assertion that they had seen Faster Than Light (FTL) neutrinos.

While this should be no real surprise to anyone who's been following the story, the most interesting part is yet to come. Having hoodwinked many of the major particle physics investigators into looking into this FTL neutrino question, the investigators at CERN have managed to give themselves a relatively uncrowded window in which to further their search for the Higgs boson.

We should expect some kind of announcement from CERN regarding either the finding of the Higgs or of their having excluded yet another energy range from its potential home.

When will the particle physics community learn not to take any announcements from CERN at face value? They've done nothing but spout red herrings for the past year or more, whether "sharing" the best places to look for the Higgs boson or telling us they've found it, but won't have confirmation for several months, or they've seen FTL neutrinos and need help figuring out what's actually going on, or any number of other things.

CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said, in a press release, that ”Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down.
“The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action – an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments. That’s how science moves forward."

That's how science moves forward indeed - by pulling the proverbial wool over the eyes of competing investigators in order to grab the glory. Lobachevsky anyone?

Watch this space to see what's really been going on at CERN - it should be quite interesting!

Posted by Procrustes 17

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OOTing Out the Higgs Boson at CERN
Finally conCERNed About Facts
Still Playing The unCERNtainty Card
CERN Boosts Their Beams

Wisconsin And Tocqueville

You know, the way I always expect the worst of people and politicians (both of them, people AND politicians) you'd think that I would be used to being pleasantly surprised by the way things tend to turn out better than I had anticipated, but you'd be wrong because I am sadly correct far too often for my taste, so it was great to see that voters in Wisconsin actually voted in their own self interest rather than in the interest of their putative public servants who see themselves as a down-trodden ruling class. How's that for a bizarre self-concept? down-trodden rulers? Anyway, now that the stock market has expressed the economy's collective relief at the turning back of the thuggery, kleptocracy, and union-bossery I thought it was time to drag out that great quote from Alexis de Tocqueville that everyone knows, but that no one seems to believe anymore:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

I think that the vote in Wisconsin may actually have put a glimmer of hope in these jaded eyes of mine - not that I'm going to be looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or anything like that, but it may be that the voters there finally figured out whose largesse was being voted to whom and they realized that we're on the verge of running out of "them" as in "tax them to pay for whatever it is that I want for myself" and so it's time for people to start paying their own way rather than soaking the tax-target group du jour (take that, de Tocqueville!).

Sorry to sound a note of hope. I'll try not to make it a habit.

Posted by Lewis Cannon

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The Countdown To IPv6 Has Started!

Oh great, here we are already days into the end of the internet as we know it and no one seems to be worrying about how the oldsters running our country and all the other Big Brother wannabe types around the world are getting ready to track all of us all the time with more precision and persistence than Microsoft or Google would ever consider in their wildest gin-soaked dreams of advertising revenue avarice.

That's right, just this week, the biggies of the internet backbone switched on the IPv6 switches with no intention of switching them back off and they're calling for all of us to get with the program and be part of the connected generation and give them access to our logs and join the 1% of folks who are already doing this.

You may remember my warning about the unexpected uses that IPv6 will be put to by the governments of the world in tracking the activities and locations of regular citizens. In one of those, "Oh great, it's worse than I even thought and I thought I was already as cynical as I needed to be" moments, it looks like stopping all those PIPA and ACTA and other acronyms has only pushed them back to where they were in the first place - forcing everyone onto IPv6 with its powerful tracking and surveillance aspects intact and probably enhanced.

Of course, this is all also an attempt by the big switch manufacturers to manufacture demand for the stuff they make that nobody wants to buy because it costs more, makes security more difficult, disrupts all the processes and procedures that are already in place, and still seems unnecessary to most companies, let alone most IT staff and regular people who like to think that there's somewhere they can go even virtually where nobody knows you're a dog. The next step is probably to put IPv6 in the RFID chips that veterinarians put in dogs so the governments of the world will know when and where our dogs are near a wireless connection.

Won't someone think of the canines?!?!

Posted by Gyro Gearloose

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