Thursday, May 31, 2012

Everything is a war

War against drugs
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War against poverty
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War against want
.
War against everything
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And criminally the biggest war although not seen as such is against ourselves.
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A war taking place in our own bodies.
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In our own minds.
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A war we have been losing for some time now.
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Seldom can humanity have been fighting so many so called wars at one time.
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Predictably the word war applied to all these different subjects has lost its meaning.
.
Lost our interest too.
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When it is clear that the so called war on drugs to name but one is a great big scam.
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No wonder most people feel ever more disinterest and scorn for the politicians who literally refuse to even discuss more intelligent options.
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Hard to respect these same men and women who deplore bad behaviour by the poor in society.
.
Those living in poverty.
.
Those with few if any real choices.

The war must now be to fight this hypocricy that is our real war.
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A war to engage our leaders with reality.
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To bestir ourselves before these men and women lead us into total disaster.
.
And this can only happen when we engage our minds to take action for those things we believe in.
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War on empty words and silly actions.
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Enough of their silly wars.
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What do you want?
.
A nice fair society?
.
Chances for all?
.
Mmmmm!
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How about making your own war.
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First on your own mind.
.
A mind grown used to switching off at the word war.
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Used to letting others think for you.
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No longer
.
Try engaging your own mind to see reality and not the press delivered pap.
.
Time to engage yourself in actions.
.
Actions to support those things important to you.
.
No more wars.
.
Just engagement to resolve our problems.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Demurrage




Is a term used to describe the cost associated with owning or holding currency over a given period of time.


It is sometimes referred to as a carrying cost of money.

For commodity money such as gold, demurage is in practice nothing more than the cost of storing and securing the gold.

It is regarded by some as having a number of advantages over interest: while interest on deposits lead to discount the future and to place immediate gains ahead of long-term concerns.

Demurrage does the opposite, creating an incentive to invest in assets which lead to longer-term sustainable growth.

Furthermore, demurrage acts like inflation, stimulating the circulation of the currency, encouraging economic activity, and increasing employment.

Demurage-charged local currency was successfully tested in the Austrian town of Worgl between 1932 and 1934, until the Austrian central bank stopped the experiment.

Bernard Lietner also documents in his book Mysterium Geld the use of demurrage currency systems in Europe's High Middle Ages.
.
Bracleate systems and ancient Egypt's ostraka - dated receipts for the storage of grain - and credits these currency systems with the great prosperity of these societies.
.
There is great merit to be gained from creating a financial system that encourages thrift.
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That causes money to decline in value over time along with everything else on this planet.
.
Challenge to you, name anything except money that does not decline in value over time.
.
In all the talk of what we must now do little if any talk centres on the fact that the current system does not work, is broken, kaput!
.
Until this is admitted talk of other approaches will be drowned out.
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Vested interests will not allow discussion, in any meaningful forum of ideas they do not own or control.
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Effort must be made to change this situation.
.
The discussion of demurrage and negative interest are of importance.
.
They offer an option to the current unsustainable system of positive interest.
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It need not be this way.
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If we all engage that is.
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Are you?

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Those sweet fruit juices


Researchers said that fruit juices should be taken off the five-a-day recommendations.
.
Most health guidelines encourage people to consume drinks such
as orange and apple juice in order to have a healthy balanced diet yet ignore dried fruits.
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But the findings of two teams of British researchers turns that advice on its head – concluding that fruit juices should be avoided and dried fruit consumption encouraged.
.
The first study found that even freshly squeezed fruit juices can contain as much as five teaspoons of sugar per glass because the squeezing process concentrates their sweetness.
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This is around two-thirds of the amount found in a can of soda and can contribute to obesity and also disturb blood sugar levels and the body's natural metabolism, the study found.
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Researchers said that the juices should be taken off the five-a-day recommendations so that people are encouraged to eat whole fruits and vegetables instead which have far more nutrients per calorie.
.
Dr Hans-Peter Kubis, Bangor University in North Wales, said that the fruit juices could encourage a "sweet tooth".
.
I'd question the wisdom of including fruit juice in the five-a-day message.," he said
.
The problem is people often substitute them for real fruit which is a mistake.
.
Fruit juice is higher in sugars than people realise and they are likely to encourage drinking too much sugar.
.
He suggested that one part of fruit juice should be diluted with four parts of water in order to make them more healthy.
.
In the second study, partly conducted by the University of Leeds, researchers found that dried fruits contain just as many antioxidants, polyphenols and nutrients as normal fruit.
.
It found that dried fruits can help combat cancer, metabolic disease and heart problems.
.
They are also a good source of fibre, vitamins and minerals.
.
The researchers have called for advice to encourage people to eat more of the dried fruit and for them to be included in the five-a-day messages
.
Professor Gary Williamson said that dried fruits were often overlooked because people assumed they were too tasty to be good for you.
.
We are not saying you should get all five of your five-a-day from dried fruit but you could definitely get at least one.
.
Some fruits including dried fruits contain high levels of a variety of polyphenols and we are just starting to understand their health protective effect.
.
Professor Daniel Gallaher, of the University of Minnesota who was also involved, said: "Dried fruits are great sources of total and soluble fibre in the diet."
.
Richard Alleyne

Monday, May 28, 2012

A better way of thinking




Today modern man looks at resources as possessions.

There was a time when man looked at resources as gifts.

Today somebody somewhere claims to own everything.

From water to land to everything above and below it.

The thinking being that all things are fundamentally ours.

Devoid of any obligation.

When we look at things as gifts then by contrast they generate obligation.

Whether we are speaking of a traditional gift-giving social network.

Or the gifts of life.

Of fortune.

And talent.

When we use these gifts selfishly we experience a discomfort.

This in turn creates an anxiety that fuels and encourages even more acquiring, taking, and owning.

One way or another we have to break this cycle of greed and mindless grabbing.

That it does not bring peace of mind is clear.

That we can break this pattern is only just becoming conscious.

First it was important for all to see how greed destroys.

How corruption is destroying those societies and cultures where it is allowed to rage unchecked.

Societies where Kings and Princes, Dictators and Presidents for life reign supreme.

The time is now upon us where these be confronted.

Confronted for their greed and abuse of the rights of their people.

Rights that all humans should enjoy.

Could enjoy.

The right to reasonable chances in life.

Sick greedy people need to be challenged for their mindless grabbing.
.
Hang on a minute their own greed is hurrying them to a time of change.
.
Not one they want however inherent in greed is the seed of its own destruction.
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And while they have been busy grabbing and stealing the arch grabbers the bankers have been going at it in overdrive.
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Such is the inertia inherent in this drive that we are on the brink of real change.
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Then we can say goodbye to many of them.
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Watch your own motives though.
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Make sure they are not greedy ones as well.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Talking sense


When the activities of government are just as transparent to the people as the activities of the people are to the government, then we will have a truly open society
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Many of us are tired of the modern world with its, violence, alienation, poverty and deadness.
.
Economic degrowth is now the only way forward to a fairer more socially pleasant world.
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The scarcity of time is one reason we over consume,, attempting to compensate for the loss this most primal of all wealth
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Time is life.
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To be truly rich is to have sovereignty over our own time.
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Certainly no person has more right to than any other to benefit from, say , the inventions of Robert Boyle or Thomas Edison, much less the vast cultural context that made their work possible
.
When commercial applications guide science, we end up not with science but with countrfeit pseudo science in service of profit.
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Shift taxation onto property and resources, sales and income taxes will be reduced or eliminated.
.
Today, pollution and other forms of environmental degradation generate costs that are usually born by society and future generations.
.
But ultimately every form of pollution and depletion should be subject to payment.
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With economic disincentives for cheap throwaway goods, manufactured items will become more expensive more durable and more repairable.
.
These measures shift taxes away from income and onto resources so that we are taxed not on what we contribute but on what we take.
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Internalisation of costs will remove many illusory economies of scale that favour long distance transport.
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While the elimination of economic rents will ameliorate the obscene wage differentials that now exist between rich and poor countries.
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The natural wealth of the earth, which was made by no man.
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The current economic system essentially forces us to work for what is already ours.
.
Charles Eisenstein

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Regulating mechanism - going, going, gone



In sediment traces and fossil records from one of Earth’s most tumultuous periods, geologists have found a narrative linking mass extinctions with planetary biological and geological change.
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After dramatic oceanic extinctions 250 million and 200 million years ago, the global carbon cycle turned chaotic. 
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Earth’s biogeochemistry went boom and bust for millions of years thereafter, as if some regulating mechanism were lost — which is exactly what happened.
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People talk about saving biodiversity, and isn’t it good to have a variety of all these creatures.
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But the reason it matters is because ecosystem function is itself dependent on diversity in the face of normal environmental changes, said geologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University. 
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Lower diversity too much, and the system will lose its resiliency. 
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It will become a slave to otherwise minor environmental changes.
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Whiteside specializes in reading the geological record of past extinctions, teasing from rocks and fossils the story of those times in Earth’s history when, for one reason or another, most forms of life ceased to exist.
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In the new study, published Jan. 5 in Geology, Whiteside and University of Washington biologist Peter Ward focus on two mass extinctions with especially catastrophic marine consequences: the Permian - Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, when 96 percent of all ocean species went extinct, and the Triassic - Jurassic extinction 200 million years ago, which extinguished 20 percent of all marine families.
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Scientists say that another mass extinction is now underway, with extinction rates an order of magnitude higher than normal, both on land and at sea. 
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Studies like Whiteside’s suggest what the extinction’s consequences could be — not just for people, on a scale of decades or centuries, but for how the planet will work, millions of years in the future.
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Mass extinction events give us a whole suite of experiments that demonstrate what happens when you have catastrophic diversity loss.

Ammonoid diversity (left) and carbon-cycle stability (right) from the end-Triassic (top) through end-Permian (bottom) mass extinctions.
She and Ward analyzed seafloor sediments from the coast of British Columbia that accumulated during and between the two extinctions, measuring the ratios of different types of carbon.
Because living creatures metabolize only certain types of carbon, the sediment record becomes a proxy for large-scale patterns in the carbon cycle. 
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It distinguishes those eras when ocean ecosystems — which, at the most fundamental level, serve as giant conduits of carbon between the ocean floor and atmosphere — were productive, and when they were not.
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Then Whiteside and Ward looked at the fossil record of ammonoids, a class of creatures that resemble shelled squid and dominated Earth’s oceans from 400 million to 65 million years ago. 
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Their fossils are common and well-preserved enough to provide not just a record of biodiversity, but of functional diversity: how different species likely occupied similar ecological niches, providing a built-in redundancy that helps ecosystems weather the loss of individual specie
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After each extinction, a rich variety of ammonoid species and body plans was replaced by a few free-floating types. 
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In tandem with this loss of diversity, global carbon cycles oscillated wildly for millions of years.
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The researchers don’t think this was a coincidence. 
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Ecosystems act as thermodynamic stabilizers, and “the carbon cycle integrates biological processes with physical Earth processes.
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As the thinner ecosystems were strained and overwhelmed by the inevitable perturbations of volcanic activity orchanges in Earth's orbit, the planet went a bit haywire. 
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The chaos lasted for about 6 million years after each extinction, until new ecosystems formed and stabilized the carbon cycle.
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Even though contemporary time is just a blink in geological terms, the findings still have modern relevance, said Whiteside. 
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One might see, at a far smaller scale, similar patterns in regions like the Sea of Japan or off the coast of North Carolina, where overfishing and pollution have produced stripped-down ecosystems devoid of the large predators needed to maintain the rich food webs crucial to a stable carbon cycle.
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What’s wonderful about looking at the past is the long lens of geological history, said Whiteside. 
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There is evidence that food web collapse is starting to occur in some marine ecosystems. 
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It will take a long time for systems to recover.
Jessica H. Whiteside and Peter D. Ward.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Talking dog



A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house. 
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Talking Dog For Sale. 
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He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard. 
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The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador Retriever sitting there. 
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You talk?  he asks. 
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Yep, the Lab replies. 
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After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says 
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So, what's your story?         
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The Lab looks up and says.
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Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young.
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I wanted to help the government, so I joined the CIA.  
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In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.
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I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running.
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But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any younger so I decided to settle down. 
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I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. 
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I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.
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'I got married, had a  mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired.
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The guy is amazed. 
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He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. 
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Ten dollars, the guy says.
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Ten dollars? 
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This dog is amazing!
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Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?' 
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Because he's a liar.
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He's never been out of the yard.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Watermelon


Watermelon, an all time favourite fruit for meals and snacks is actually a “vegetable”. 

The origin of watermelon can be traced back to early Egyptian civilization, which is still evident in the hieroglyphics on the wall paintings. 

The fruit was held in high regard and often placed on the tombs of many kings and pharaohs. 


Watermelon has played the role of a thirst quenching fruit in countries in the Mediterranean region due to the scarcity of water in these areas. 

The African slaves brought watermelon seeds to the western countries and eventually United States has turned out to be one of the leading commercial growers of watermelon. 

Recent researches show that watermelon is one of the major cucurbit crops in the world accounting for around 7% of world area devoted for vegetable crops.

Watermelons are available throughout the year and are grown for their fleshy, juicy and sweet fruit. 

Its natural sweetness makes it a delicious and refreshing dessert especially in hot climate. Watermelons are perfect addition to a salad, salsa or a cool drink. 

Today there are numerous varieties of watermelon with red, pink, orange or yellow flesh. Watermelon consists of more than 91% of water and nearly 8% sugar.

The sweet and juicy watermelon has lots of nutritional benefits:

· It is fat free.
· It has very low sodium content.
· It is Cholesterol free.
· It is a good source of Vitamins A & C

Recent study on watermelons has revealed that it has numerous potential health benefits. 

The red variety of watermelon contains high concentrations of Lycopene, an anti-oxidant that helps to reduce the risk of many diseases. 

Lycopene and beta-carotene are compounds called carotenoids, which are highly colored pigments that help protect plants against damage from sunlight. 

These antioxidants neutralize the harmful free radicals in the human body. 

Free radicals in the human body cause great deal of damage by oxidizing cholesterol and making it stick to the blood vessel walls, eventually leading to heart attack or stroke. 

Lycopene in watermelons get rid of these thereby reducing the risk of other fatal diseases such as asthma attacks, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, colon cancer and other heart diseases.

The American Heart Association has certified watermelon to be one of the constituents of a sensible low saturated fat, low cholesterol diet. 

Watermelon is grown in many nations and is highly priced in a few. 

Watermelon is often given as a precious gift in Japan where they call it, Suika. 

The Japanese wrap it beautifully in a protective covering or cellophane and present it. 

All parts of watermelon are dibble. 

The rind is used for making sweet pickles and the seeds can be baked and salted.

Watermelon juice known as Agua Fresca in Mexican and is a delicacy in the country. 

With more than 50 varieties of watermelon there are varieties of juices in the market with a perfect blend with other additives.

Christine Macguire 

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

A world of numbers



Try to imagine a day without numbers.
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Try to imagine getting through the first hour of that day.
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No alarm clock, no time, no date, no television or radio, no stock market report or sports results in the newspapers, no bank account to check.
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The fact is, our lives depend on numbers.
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You may not have "a head for figures", but you certainly have a head full of them.
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Most of what we do each day is conditioned by numbers.
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Indeed, the degree to which our modern society depends on those that are hidden from us was made clear by the financial meltdown in 2008, when overconfident reliance on the advanced mathematics of the credit market led to a collapse of the global financial system.
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How did we become so familiar with, and so reliant on, these abstractions that our ancestors invented just a few thousand years ago?
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By the latter part of the first millennium AD, the system we use today to write numbers and do arithmetic had been worked out – expressing any number using just the 10 numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing them by the procedures we are all taught in primary school.
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This familiar way to write numbers and do arithmetic is known as the Hindu-Arabic system, a name that reflects its history.
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Before the 13th century, however, the only Europeans aware of this system were, by and large, scholars, who used it solely to do mathematics.
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Traders recorded their data using Roman numerals, and performed calculations either by using their fingers or with a mechanical abacus.
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That state of affairs started to change soon after 1202, the year a young Italian man, Leonardo of Pisa, whom a historian centuries later would dub "Fibonacci", completed the first general-purpose book of arithmetic in the West.
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Liber abbaci explained the "new" methods in terms understandable to ordinary people – and its influence did as much as any other book to shape the development of modern Western Europe.
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Leonardo had learnt about the Hindu-Arabic number system when his father took him to the north African port of Bugia (now Bejaïa, in Algeria) in around 1185.
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Years later, his book would provide not only a bridge that allowed arithmetic to cross the Mediterranean, but also one between the mathematical cultures of the Arabic and European worlds.
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It was an act every bit as revolutionary as the one carried out by personal computer pioneers in the Eighties who took computing from a small group of "computer types" and made it available to, and usable by, anyone.
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Not only did the appearance of Liber abbaci prepare the stage for the development of modern algebra and hence modern mathematics, but it also marked the beginning of the modern financial system and the way of doing business that depends on sophisticated banking methods.
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Until recently, history had relegated Leonardo to a footnote.
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Indeed, his name is known today primarily in connection with the Fibonacci numbers, a sequence that arises from the solution to the "rabbit problem", one of many whimsical challenges he put in Liber abbaci to break the tedium of the hundreds of practical problems that dominate the book.
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Nestled between puzzles involving the division of food and money, the rabbit problem involves an attempt to count a growing population. 
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Leonardo did not invent it: it dates back at least to the Indian mathematicians who developed the number system that Liber abbaci described.
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But he realised, as they did, that it was an excellent way to practise how to use the new number system.
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In what was to become his most famous passage, Leonardo wrote his way into 20th-century popular culture with these words:
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A certain man had one pair of rabbits together in a certain enclosed place, and one wishes to know how many are created from the pair in one year when it is the nature of them in a single month to bear another pair, and in the second month those born to bear also.'' 
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Leonardo wanted the reader to assume that once two rabbits become fertile, they produce off-spring every month.
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As usual, he explained the solution in full detail, but the modern reader can rapidly discern the solution by glancing at the table Leonardo also presented, giving the rabbit population each month: one animal at the beginning, then two, then three, then five, then eight, then 13, then 21, then 34, then 55, then 89, then 144.
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The general rule is that each successive number is the result of adding together the previous two: 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 5 = 8, etc.
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The numbers generated by this process are known today as the Fibonacci numbers, and were given their name by the French mathematician Edouard Lucas in the 1870s, after his compatriot, the historian Guillaume Libri, gave Leonardo the nickname Fibonacci in 1838.
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One main reason why these numbers retain their fascination today is due to the surprising frequency with which they arise in nature. 
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For example, the number of petals on flowers is a Fibonacci number more often than would be expected from pure chance: an iris has three petals; primroses, buttercups, wild roses, larkspur, and columbine have five; delphiniums have eight; ragwort, corn marigold, and cineria 13; asters, black-eyed Susan, and chicory 21; daisies 13, 21, or 34; and Michaelmas daisies 55 or 89
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Sunflower heads, and the bases of pine cones exhibit spirals going in opposite directions: the sunflower has 21, 34, 55, 89, or 144 clockwise, paired respectively with 34, 55, 89, 144, or 233 counter clockwise; a pine cone has eight clockwise spirals and 13 counter clockwise.
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All Fibonacci numbers.
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In reality, however, a far more significant part of Leonardo's legacy than the Fibonacci sequence are the 14 medieval manuscripts of the Liber abbaci that have survived.
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It's a strange feeling to hold, as I have in Florence, a book written by a medieval scribe more than 800 years ago who played such a major part in the development of the modern world.
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Every age produces a few individuals who are both ahead of their time and of their time: figures such as Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein.
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Today, Leonardo's name ought to be placed among them as one of the great individuals who has shaped our world.
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For we live with Leonardo's legacy every day – every time we do something that depends upon the modern arithmetic he brought to the West.
.
 Keith Devlin

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Cyber warfare



Operation Locked Shields, an international military exercise held last month, was not exactly your usual game of soldiers. 
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It involves no loud bangs or bullets, no tanks, aircraft or camouflage face-paint. 
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Its troops rarely even left their control room, deep within a high security military base in Estonia.
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These people represent a new kind of combatant - the cyber warrior.
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One team of IT specialists taking part in Locked Shields, were detailed to attack nine other teams, located all over Europe.
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At their terminals in the Nato Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, they cooked up viruses, worms, Trojan Horses and other internet attacks, to hijack and extract data from the computers of their pretend enemies.
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The idea was to learn valuable lessons in how to forestall such attacks on military and commercial networks. 
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The cyber threat is one that the Western alliance is taking seriously.
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It's no coincidence that Nato established its defence centre in Estonia. 
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In 2007, the country's banking, media and government websites were bombarded with Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks over a three week period, in what's since become known as Web War I. 
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The culprits are thought to have been pro-Russian hacktivists, angered by the removal of a Soviet-era statue from the centre of the capital, Tallinn.
DDOS attacks are quite straightforward.
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Networks of thousands of infected computers, known as botnets, simultaneously access the target website, which is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic, and so temporarily disabled.
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However, DDOS attacks are a mere blunderbuss by comparison with the latest digital weapons.
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Today, the fear is that Web War II - if and when it comes - could inflict physical damage, leading to massive disruption and even death.

They could cause power blackouts - not just by shutting off the power but by permanently damaging generators that would take months to replace.
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They could do things like cause [oil or gas] pipelines to explode.
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They could ground aircraft.
Clarke's worries are fuelled by the current tendency to put more of our lives online, and indeed, they appear to be borne out by experiments carried out in the United States.

Start Quote

A power station might have less anti-virus protection than the average laptop”
At the heart of the problem are the interfaces between the digital and physical worlds known as Scada - or Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition - systems.
Today, these computerised controllers have taken over a myriad jobs once performed manually.
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They do everything from opening the valves on pipelines to monitoring traffic signals.
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Soon, they'll become commonplace in the home, controlling smart appliances like central heating.
And crucially, they use cyberspace to communicate with their masters, taking commands on what to do next, and reporting any problems back.
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Into these networks, and in theory you have control of national electricity grids, water supplies, distribution systems for manufacturers or supermarkets, and other critical infrastructure.
In 2007, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) demonstrated the potential vulnerability of Scada systems.
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Using malicious software to feed in the wrong commands, they attacked a large diesel generator.
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Film of the experiment shows the machine shaking violently before black smoke engulfs the screen.
Although this took place under laboratory conditions, with the attackers given free rein to do their worst, the fear is that, one day, a belligerent state, terrorists, or even recreational hackers, might do the same in the real world.
"Over the past several months we've seen a variety of things," says Jenny Mena of the DHS. "


There are now search engines that make it possible to find those devices that are vulnerable to an attack through the internet.
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In addition we've seen an increased interest in this area in the hacker and hacktivist community.
One reason why Scada systems may be prone to hacking is that engineers, rather than specialist programmers, are often likely to have designed their software.
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They are expert in their field, says German security consultant Ralph Langner, but not in cyber defence.
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At some point they learned how to develop software, but you can't compare them to professional software developers who probably spent a decade learning.
Moreover, critical infrastructure software can be surprisingly exposed.
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A power station, for example, might have less anti-virus protection than the average laptop.
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And when vulnerabilities are detected, it can be impossible to repair them immediately with a software patch. 
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It requires you to re-boot.
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And a power plant has to run 24-7, with only a yearly power-down for maintenance.
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So until the power station has its annual stoppage, new software cannot be installed.
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Stuxnet appeared to target a specific type of Scada system doing a specific job, and it did little damage to any other applications it infected.
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Langner is well-qualified to comment. 
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In 2010 he, along with two employees, took it upon himself to investigate a mystery computer worm known as Stuxnet, that was puzzling the big anti-virus companies.
What he discovered took his breath away.
It was clever enough to find its way from computer to computer, searching out its prey.
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And, containing over 15,000 lines of computer code, it exploited no fewer than four previously undiscovered software errors in Microsoft Windows.
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Such errors are extremely rare, suggesting that Stuxnet's creators were highly expert and very well-resourced.

Start Quote

It took Langner some six months to probe just a quarter of the virus. "If I'd wanted to do all of it I might have gone bust!" he jokes. 
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But his research had already drawn startling results.
Stuxnet's target, it turned out, was the system controlling uranium centrifuges at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility.
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There is now widespread speculation that the attack was the work of American or Israeli agents, or both.
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Whatever the truth, Langner estimates that it delayed Iran's nuclear project by around two years - no less than any air strike was expected to achieve - at a relatively small cost of around $10 million.
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This success, he says, means cyber weapons are here to stay.
Optimists say Stuxnet does at least suggest a scrap of reassurance.
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Professor Peter Sommer, an international expert in cyber crime, points out that the amount of research and highly skilled programming it involved would put weapons of this calibre beyond anyone but an advanced nation state.
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And states, he point out, usually behave rationally, thus ruling out indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets.
You don't necessarily want to cause total disruption.
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Because the results are likely to be unforeseen and uncontrollable.
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In other words, although one can conceive of attacks that might bring down the world financial system or bring down the internet, why would one want to do that?
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You would end up with something not that different from a nuclear winter.
But even this crumb of comfort is denied by Langner, who argues that, having now infected computers worldwide, Stuxnet's code is available to anyone clever enough to adapt it, including terrorists.
The attack vectors and exploits used by Stuxnet - they can be copied and re-used reliably against completely different targets.
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Until a year ago no one was aware of such an aggressive and sophisticated threat. 
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With Stuxnet that has changed. 
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It is on the table.
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The technology is out there on the internet."
One thing is for sure, he adds: If cyber weapons do become widespread, their targets will lie mostly in the west, rather than in countries like Iran, which have relatively little internet dependence.
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This means that the old rules of military deterrence which favoured powerful, technologically advanced countries like the United States do not apply:
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Responding in kind to a cyber attack could be effectively impossible.
This asymmetry is likely to grow, as developed countries become ever more internet-dependent.
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So far, the Internet Protocol format allows only 4.3 billion IP addresses, most of which have now been used.
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But this year, a new version is rolling out, providing an inexhaustible supply of addresses and so allowing exponential growth in connectivity.
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Expect to see far more machines than people online in the future.
In the home, fridges will automatically replenish themselves by talking to food suppliers; ovens and heating systems will respond to commands from your smartphone.
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Cars may even drive themselves, sharing GPS data to find the best routes.
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For industry, commerce and infrastructure, there will be even more reliance on cyber networks that critics claim are potentially vulnerable to intrusion.

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"There will be practically infinite number of IP addresses," says former hacker Jason Moon. "
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Everything can have an IP address.
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And everything will have one.
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Now, that's great.
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But think what that's going to do for the hacker!
In fact, it has already become a challenge for even sensitive installations, let alone households, to remain offline.
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Although military and other critical networks are supposedly isolated from the public internet, attackers can target their contractors and suppliers, who plug into the "air-gapped" system at various times.
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Somewhere down the food chain, a vulnerable website or a rogue email will provide a way in.
According to Richard Clarke, the mighty American armed forces themselves are not immune, since their command; control, supplies, and even some weapons systems, also rely on digital systems.
The US military ran headlong into the cyber age.
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And we became very dependent on cyber devices without thinking it through.
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Without thinking that if someone got control of our software, what would we be able to do?
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Do we have backup systems?
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Can we go back to the old days?
The answer it seems is no.
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A new form of weapon appears to be emerging.
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And the world may have to learn to adapt.