My latest wallpaper design — it started life as a photograph of coral, and mutated into …

Space Coral 3

Full sized image: Link.

“… Fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.”

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

… Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

… Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated.

- Elisabeth Rosenthal @ New York Times: April 26, 2008: Link.

Via Jon Taplin’s blog: Link.

Small Is beautiful.

Wired.com recently published some beautiful nanophotography — finalists in the Materials Research Society’s semi-annual collection of images as art:

… This image shows the magnetic domains of a thin iron film sitting atop a crystal made from magnesium and gallium arsenate. Souliman el Moussaoui, a researcher at the ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Italy, used X-ray magnetic circular dichroism with photoelectron-emission microscopy to create the striking picture …. el Moussaoui shot the sample with two oppositely polarized beams of powerful X-rays — and then subtracted the data points in one file from the other.

- Aaron Rowe @ Wired.com: 04.25.08: Link.

Via Slashdot: Link.

ELETTRA

ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory is a national synchrotron laboratory located in Basovizza on the outskirts of Trieste, Italy.

The facility, available for use by the Italian and international scientific communities, houses several ultrabright light sources, which use the sychrotron and free electron laser (FEL) sources to produce light ranging from ultraviolet to X-rays.

The centre also houses the European Storage Ring FEL Project (EUFELE).

• ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory website
• Lightsources.org: ELETTRA Synchrotron Light Laboratory

- Wikipedia: Link.

“A new study provides the first inventories of microbial capabilities in nine very different types of ecosystems, ranging from coral reefs to deep mines.”

The microbial study produced … evidence that viruses — which are known to be ten times more abundant than even microbes — serve as gene banks for ecosystems. This evidence includes observations that viruses in the nine ecosystems carried large loads of DNA without using such DNA themselves …. The viruses probably transfer such excess DNA to bacteria during infections, and thereby pass on “new genetic tricks” to their microbial hosts. The study also indicates that by transporting the DNA to new locations, viruses may serve as important agents in the evolution of microbes.

- Science Daily: Mar. 14, 2008: Link.

Thought for today:

“To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. “

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd. or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

- J.B.S. Haldane
“On Being the Right Size” in the (1928) book “Possible Worlds”
Link @ Wikiquote

“John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (November 5, 1892 – December 1, 1964), known as Jack (but who used ‘J.B.S.’ in his printed works), was a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.”

- Wikipedia: Link.

Thought for Today:

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

- Woodrow Wilson
From an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association
Jan. 9th, 1909: Link.

“In one shoot-out, the KGB found themselves up against men from the interior ministry, as the security services were effectively privatised, each arm guarding a different client.”

Toby Clements reviews McMafia: Crime without Frontiers by Misha Glenny –

By the Mafia, Misha Glenny means any group of organised criminals, not just those with their roots in Sicily. Balkan cigarette smugglers, Nigerian internet phishers, Russian oligarchs, Chinese snakehead people-traffickers, South African drug lords, Bombay extortion-racketeers, Israeli money-launderers and Brazilian cyber-thieves are among the many who play their part in a complex network of links that the author estimates makes up nearly 20 per cent of global trade.

… Where did all this money come from? In a word, Russia.

… Stark differences in wealth is one thing that typically excites criminal activity, but as … traders grew luridly wealthy, the state institutions collapsed around them, and services such as the KGB found themselves without prestige, money or purpose.

A supply of bored young men with guns is the other stimulus to crime, and soon the oligarchs needed bodyguards. In one shoot-out, the KGB found themselves up against men from the interior ministry, as the security services were effectively privatised, each arm guarding a different client.

Toby Clements @ The Telegraph : Link.

Via The Day They Tried to Kill Me: Link.

McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, by Misha Glenny: Amazon: Link.

Bus with a systems error message:

Via The Daily WTF: Link.

Now online, an “utterly fascinating archive of Mike Wallace Interview videos from the 1950s, which are hosted online by The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.”

The Mike Wallace Interview archive: Link.

Via Boing Boing:

It’s astonishing to watch television in which the host asks real questions and the guests answer in full sentences. Wallace never lets people off the hook and he smokes cigarettes like the world is ending tomorrow, piling on fulsome praise for his beloved Winstons before each interview begins.

And what a list of guests! He interviews Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvadore Dali, Leonard Ross (a 12-year-old California school boy who won a total of $164,000 on the game shows The Big Surprise and The Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar Challenge), Aldous Huxley, Gloria Swanson, Tony Perkins, Eldon Edwards (Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), Philip Wylie, Jean Seberg, Earl Browder (former head of the Communist Party in the United States), Mary Margaret McBride (the “First Lady of Radio”), David Hawkins (the youngest of 20 prisoners to defect during the Korean War), Dr. Henry Kissinger, and many more.

- Mark Frauenfelder @ Boing Boing: Link.

Earl Browder: 6/2/1957: Link.
Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party in the United States, talks to Wallace about Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, the cold war, and American communism.

Thought for today ….

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.

- John Kenneth Galbraith