Pre-Inspired

Determined not to let anything spoil their party, organizers of the 2008 Summer Olympics said Wednesday that they will take control over the most unpredictable element of all — the weather.

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The Chinese are among the world’s leaders in what is called “weather modification,” but they have more experience creating rain than preventing it. In fact, the techniques are virtually the same. Cloud-seeding is a relatively well-known practice that involves shooting various substances into clouds, such as silver iodide, salts and dry ice, that bring on the formation of larger raindrops, triggering a downpour. But Chinese scientists believe they have perfected a technique that reduces the size of the raindrops, delaying the rain until the clouds move on. The weather modification would be used only on a small area, opening what would be in effect a meteorological umbrella over the 91,000-seat Olympic stadium. The $400-million stadium, nicknamed the “bird’s nest” for its interlacing steel beams, has no roof.

Inventor and saxophone player Peter Davey has come up with a device that he claims boils water in no time. He calls it the “sonic boiler” because he claims it uses the power of sound. How the heater actually works has confounded experts. The device looks oddly like a bent desk lamp, with a metallic ball at the end instead of a lightbulb. When plugged into the power supply, and the ball is lowered into water, it boils the liquid within seconds — even as little as a tablespoonful.

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He said he first came up with the concept 50 years ago and it took him half of those years to figure out how to make the device. “The principle is beautiful. I have cashed in on a natural phenomenon and it’s all about music,” he said. “If I hadn’t been playing the saxophone, I probably wouldn’t have come up with the idea.” Davey noticed as he played the saxophone at home that everything resonated at a different frequency. “The glasses will tinkle on one note. Knives and forks in the drawer will tinkle on another note and I realised that everything has its point of vibration,” he said. “In the same way, a component in the ball is tuned to a certain frequency.”

(…)The bigger mystery is how “Canadian” came to be code for black. An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a “masked replacement” for black. Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. “She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else,” the blogger wrote. “After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]” A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that “fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians…. They’re all yours.’ ” Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university’s Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other. “This ‘code’ word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious,” he said. “What’s left? Right, the guys to the north.”

If sound could bend around objects in just the right way, submarines could evade sonar detection and large beams and columns wouldn’t obstruct

concert-hall acoustics. This type of acoustic invisibility is possible, according to physicists who hope to develop the theoretical sound-wave-bending materials. The result would be a shell that acts as an acoustic cloak—something like an invisibility cloak, but for sound, not light. Sound waves would bend around a cloaked object and then continue on their original courses. It would appear as though they had passed directly through the shell, “as if nothing had been there at all,” said Steven Cummer of Duke University, lead author of a new study.

Trepanation is the practice of removing a piece of the skull to expose part of the brain. It’s one of the oldest known surgical procedures, dating back at least to 6500 BC. It’s still practiced today, for medical reasons and also voluntarily to achieve enlightenment. Ten years ago, I wrote an article for bOING bOING Digital about Peter Halvorson, a guy who drilled a hole in his head to yield a permanent high. Peter is now the director of the International Trepanation Advocacy Group. For even more on trepanation through the ages, check out “An illustrated history of trepanation” newly posted to the Neurophilosophy blog. From the article:

“In the earliest European trepanned skulls, the holes were made by scraping the bone away with sharp stones such as flint or obsidian; later, primitive drilling tools were used to drill small holes arranged in circles, after which the piece of bone inside the circle was removed. The late Medieval period saw the introduction of mechanical drilling and sawing instruments, whose sophistication would continue to increase for several hundred years. There is a great deal of speculation about why ancient civilizations used trepanation, as it was - and still is - carried out in the absence of head trauma. However, it is almost certain that all those who used it did so because they somehow linked the brain with behaviour. Some anthropologists suggest that trepanation was performed as part of tribal or superstitious rituals. Other researchers believe that the procedure was used as a treatment for conditions such as headaches, epilepsy, hydrocephalus and mental disorders. These were presumably attributed to possession by evil demons, such that a hole in the skull would have provided the spirits a passage for escape. Although the reasons for trepanning and the instruments used for the procedure differ with time and from culture to culture, the result is always the same: a hole in the head, usually made when the individual was fully conscious and, often, unanaesthetized.”

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.” The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

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The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Mr. Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al Qaeda or both.

finally…

Mr. Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al Qaeda, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al Qaeda. The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.

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