(Click photo to enlarge.)

I saw this yesterday at the Airport, with the version in French being right beside this poster.

That’s how they’re going to shut it down:

The Pentagon will offer the H1N1 vaccination to detainees at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, officials there said Friday.

The Pentagon made the decision based on U.S. government assessments that people held in detention facilities are at high risk for the pandemic, said Maj. Diana R. Haynie, a spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, which is in charge of holding the suspected terrorists.

The vaccination is mandatory for all uniformed personnel, she said. The vaccinations will be voluntary for the detainees, who will be briefed on the virus and the vaccine prior to deciding whether to receive the latter.

Some of the detainees have already voluntarily taken the seasonal flu shot, Haynie said.

Bush’s Brain: Smart, but Too Certain – True Slant

Why this universe?

What is everything made of?

How does complexity happen?

Will string theory ever be proved correct?

What is the singularity?

What is reality really?

How far can physics take us?

The Times – October 19, 2009:

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”

The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s.

Scientists claim the giant atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being jinxed from the future to save the world.

In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim nature is trying to prevent the LHC from finding the elusive Higgs boson. Called the “God particle,” the theoretical boson could explain the origins of mass in the universe — if physicists can find the darn thing.

The scientists say their math proves nature will “ripple backward through time” to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay. “He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

iRobot’s soft, shape-shifting robot blob can roll around and change shape.

Researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said asteroid Apophis has just a four in a million chance of hitting Earth, while previous estimates of impact were pegged at one in 45,000.

Apophis has been on the minds of astronomers since 2004, when there was a 2.7% chance of impact in 2029 — the asteroid has a diameter almost three football fields in diameter. Given its size, it’s significantly smaller than the six-mile-wide asteroid believed to have impacted Earth and eliminated dinosaur life on the planet.

After the threat of a 2029 impact was reduced, astronomers believed 2036 is the most likely year it could hit our planet.

According to the calculations calculated by the University of Hawaii 88-inch telescope and 90-inch Bok telescope, Apophis is expected to pass within 18,000 miles of Earth in 2029.

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
[...]
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”. The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth.”
[...]
She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts.

[...]“There was already water,” she said.

“There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding.”

What is it with these one-way space flights lately? First it was a guy saying a one-way to Mars might be a good idea. Now this guy. Admittedly, there is a bit of the Astronaut Farmer and (I’m guessing) a lot of weed involved with this one.

The U.S. government is expecting delivery starting this week of enough doses of the new swine-flu vaccine for nearly every American who wants it, but state and local budget cuts coupled with limits on who can administer the vaccine could hamstring the campaign.

A big question is how many people will actually want the vaccine amid concerns that it has been rushed to market and could produce side effects, as well as a sense among some that the disease isn’t serious enough to warrant seeking a shot.

The CDC is rolling out a media campaign to promote vaccination, with ads expected on buses in Chicago, Dallas and several other cities within the next two weeks. One will remind pregnant women that “flu can harm you and your baby” and urge them to get shots both against seasonal flu and the H1N1 influenza.

Abstract

Since Time immemorial, man has sought to explain the powers of Kal- El, a.k.a. Superman. Siegel et al. Supposed that His mighty strength stems from His origin on another planet whose density and as a result, gravity, was much higher than our own. Natural selection on the planet of krypton would therefore endow Kal El with more efficient muscles and higher bone density; explaining, to first order, Superman’s extraordinary powers. Though concise, this theory has proved inaccurate. It is now clear that Superman is actually flying rather than just jumping really high; and His freeze-breath, x-ray vision, and heat vision also have no account in Seigel’s theory.

In this paper we propose a new unified theory for the source of Superman’s powers; that is to say, all of Superman’s extraordinary powers are manifestation of one supernatural ability, rather than a host. It is our opinion that all of Superman’s recognized powers can be unifed if His power is the ability to manipulate, from atomic to kilometer length scales, the inertia of His own and any matter with which He is in contact.