Voices of the Fallen: the war in the words of the dead-- In letters and journals and e-mails, the war dead live on, their words—urgent, honest, unself-conscious—testament to the realities of combat. What do they have to say to us? ... The result is a window on Iraq we have not had before: the bravery, the fear and the chaos of war, and the loves and hates and dreams and nightmares of the warriors. Things are incredibly busy, then they are not. The Iraqis are welcoming, then they are not. The war is going well, then it is not. The mission makes sense, then it does not. ... (video, audio, email, and text)
posted by amberglow
on Mar 30, 2007 -
14 comments
While there have been many posts on Mefi of blogs written by those affected by the Iraq War, I have not seen this one posted. No matter your stance on the war, your opinion of American soldiers, or the amount of other Iraq war blogs you've read, all I ask is that you
at least read these few entries. I've used too many words already, when the journal does more than enough to speak for itself.
A Soldier's Thoughts. (via) [more inside]
posted by wander
on Feb 7, 2007 -
13 comments
Back in 1964, a documentary was commissioned by Granada Television called
Seven Up!, which aimed to test the old Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” by studying the lives of a group of children from various backgrounds to see how their lives would develop. Every seven years thereafter, director
Michael Apted has returned to see where their lives have taken them, in a series of films known as
The Up Series. You can read a great
overview of the series here. Some have followed the path expected of them. Others have moved halfway across the world.
Some have even set up their own webpage! And others still, like Neil, have found that getting to
what may be your calling in life often requires you to take a signifcant detour,
as this video from the latest edition, 49 Up, shows.
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 1, 2007 -
79 comments
“Oh, I took the roofs road" --just one of the fascinating things at a new Iraq blog--Inside Iraq--
daily life in a war zone through the words of Iraqi journalists in McClatchy's Baghdad Bureau as they risk so much each day to survive. These are unedited first hand accounts of their experiences. Their complete names have been withheld for security reasons.
posted by amberglow
on Jan 17, 2007 -
9 comments
Cancer Cure Patented A group of researchers claim that they are patenting a possible cure for cancer involving nothing more than sugar and short-chain fatty acid combination.
posted by TravisJeffery
on Jan 4, 2007 -
26 comments
Would YOU lie to save your life? The Doctor said that I needed a keyhole operation called a coronary angioplasty to clear the blockages, but the waiting list on the NHS was nine months.
I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew that I would struggle to survive the next nine days, so nine months seemed an impossibility. What the doctor had just handed me was a virtual death sentence.
He must have seen the look of horror. He said that if I paid for the operation, he could fit me in for the angioplasty within the week.
The cost privately, he told me, would be around £8,500.
I looked at him, my head a whirl as I tried to make sense of what he was telling me. As far as I could see, the choice was clear — if I paid I would live, if I didn’t I would probably die.
I’m a pensioner living on £150 a week. And no bank would have given me a loan.
But in that split second my survival instinct kicked in and I realised I had to convince the doctor that I had the money.
‘Well, you can’t take it with you,’ I said cheerily. ‘I’ll go private.’
The following morning, I gave the administrator the cheque before I was discharged from the hospital. Some people would say this was fraud, because I knew it would bounce. But there was nothing else I could do — I wanted to live.
posted by Izzmeister
on Aug 21, 2006 -
163 comments
Beauty in bitmaps- Some artists work in watercolors, some oils, and some with clay. The 'artists' at tacoholic express themselves in the universally accessible medium of really bad MS Paint drawings. Its public so you can submit your own masterworks.
posted by AVandalay
on Aug 18, 2006 -
7 comments
Lists of the best places in the United States assume their expert can choose the absolute best place to live, or to work, or to raise a family—for everyone. Wouldn't a better way to
find great places to live in America be based on
your unique priorities and preferences?
posted by CodeBaloo
on Aug 15, 2006 -
42 comments
1-800-SUICIDE loses govt. funding: Despite the fact that almost 2 million callers have reached help and hope over the last 8 years, and a government funded evaluation stating the benefits of 1-800-SUICIDE, the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA), a division of Health & Human Services, has decided to create their own government run system where they would have direct access to confidential data on individuals in crisis. (SAMHSA has already scrubbed their websites of any and all LGBT information, and gay youth are 2-3 times more likely to commit suicide.)
Save 1-800-SUICIDE website here.
posted by amberglow
on Jul 28, 2006 -
68 comments
Nature has a somewhat technical but free
supplement on stem cells (alongwith a podcast and related
blog).
posted by Gyan
on Jul 2, 2006 -
6 comments
Never wanna work/Always wanna play/Pleasure, pleasure every day. What happens when the jobs go away and
don't return? Should we take the surpluses generated and
pay people not to work? What happens to the assumption of scarcity when
nanotechology allows us to generate potentially anything we want from
grass clippings? Maybe Marx had it wrong all along. Maybe, instead of fetishizing work and the authoritarian mindset that it generates, we should have been reading Paul Lafargue
instead.
Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if your job category disappeared? How would you spend your time? Would you invest more time and energy in friendships and other relationships? Hobbies? If you were your employer, what technologies would you use to get rid of your position and save money?
posted by jason's_planet
on Jun 25, 2006 -
43 comments
No Death Sentence for '20th Skyjacker' Moussaoui (he Newsfiltered), and as he was led from the courtroom, the defendant, who had looked for the last few weeks like he was campaigning for martyrdom, clapped his hands and said “America, you lost. I won.” (I had severely underestimated this character's skill at Political Theater) In spite of the final spit-in-the-face-of-the-US,
MSNBC.com's Unscientific Instapoll has 51% saying it was the right decision, while
CNN.com's Poll says 63%, and Foxnews.com's poll... is about tax cuts.
Disclaimer: Yes, I do some writing for the Entertainment section at MSNBC.com, but the News department does not know I exist and doesn't want to. And newssite instapolls are so-o-o Web 1.0, I know, but still, what's with the non-outrage?
posted by wendell
on May 3, 2006 -
76 comments
Get A-Life - an interesting read on
artificial life and
evolutionary computation, from the
game of life (
playable applet), through
core wars,
tierra and on to
genetic programming. This approach has recently borne fruit to genetic programming
pioneer and inventor of the
scratchcard,
John Koza, who last year
patented his invention machine, actually a
1000 machine beowulf cluster running his software, which has itself created several
inventions which have been granted patents.
[See also:
BBC Biotopia artificial life experiment, another
odd BBC evolution game,
Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective]
posted by MetaMonkey
on May 3, 2006 -
14 comments
Sad -- such a sweet-looking kid, the smile on the face of a future suicide.
Sad -- "If she only knew then how things would turn out…"
Sad -- "I chose to kill her."
Sad -- "You could see her personality break through the coma." Life is
dukkha, said the Buddha -- a Pali term that means something like "suffering" or "the incapability of satisfaction." (Or as Mick Jagger put it, "I can't get no...")
Here's the tangible evidence.
posted by digaman
on May 3, 2006 -
39 comments
Rudolf Vrba-RIP --he escaped from Auschwitz with another guy, Wetzler, in April 1944 and got to Slovakia and Hungary, telling the world of the atrocities in the Auschwitz Protocol. Some Hungarian community leaders, however (Hungary was the only country that hadn't had its Jewish population deported yet),
were busy making deals with Eichmann for safe passage away.
In any case, the result was that about 1,700 Hungarian Jewish leaders, with their families and friends, ended up in Switzerland, while almost half a million unsuspecting Hungarian Jews ended up dead in Auschwitz. Vrba's report first alerted the world (including the Vatican, Red Cross, and US and British authorities) to exactly what was going on, and helped prosecute some who were tried later.
...Knowing perfectly well that it was the secrecy surrounding their actions that allowed the Nazis to herd unsuspecting Jews and transport them like sheep to slaughter, Vrba and Wetzler — as soon as they got in touch with Jewish community representatives in their native Slovakia — compiled a detailed report. They wrote about Auschwitz and what awaited Hungarian Jews once they arrived: immediate death by gassing.
posted by amberglow
on Apr 11, 2006 -
17 comments
It was an
instant icon, with Dan Rather calling it "the best war photograph in recent years." About 100 newspapers ran the photo, dubbing the
anonymous warrior the "Marlboro Man."
The photograph hit the world on Nov. 10, 2004: a close-cropped shot of a
U.S. Marine in Iraq, his face smeared with
blood and dirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke curling across weary eyes. He's quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can't look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has
trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on
invisible triggers.
The diagnosis:
post-traumatic stress disorder.
The man in the photograph is
James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined.
Previously mentioned briefly here
posted by stenseng
on Jan 29, 2006 -
27 comments
39 Pounds of Love "is the inspirational and humorous non-fiction account of Ami Ankilewitz, who was diagnosed with an extremely rare and often fatal form of SMA/2 that severely limits his physical growth and movement yet at 34 years of age, he continues to outlive a doctor's prediction of life expectancy by 28 years and counting. Ami, who weighs only 39 pounds, works in Israel as a 3D animator and creates his art despite the fact that his bodily motion is limited to a single finger on his left hand."
posted by Gyan
on Dec 9, 2005 -
14 comments
Economist Steven Levitt, author of
Freakonomics, has long
posited a controversial thesis that legalized abortion help reduced crime, by reducing unwanted children, prone to crime. However, a new paper
argues that Levitt (& Donohue) made serious errors in their research. Properly analysed, abortion has no significant effect on crime. Levitt
disagrees, of course.
posted by daksya
on Dec 4, 2005 -
46 comments
The origin of life?! I heard from an authority in molecular biology today that a group of researchers funded by the Carnegie Institution and NASA believe they've discovered the origin of
RNA, and with that, the origin of life.
This new discovery grew out of NASA's
Deep Impact mission to study the composition of comets. Specifically, they started investigating a kind of carbon that forms in layers, with each layer slighly offset from the previous one in a helix shape. Significantly, the thickness of these carbon layers corresponds with the thickness of each twist in a strand of RNA.
It turns out that the individual building blocks of RNA are capable of bonding to this layered carbon when exposed to UV radiation. Once this has happened, apparently
formaldehyde can then bond to the building blocks of RNA on the carbon "pattern", allowing the bonded RNA to slough off into the primordial soup. Over time, some of these RNA strands could fold and bond to themselves, forming DNA. Formaldehyde, the initial bonding material, would eventually be replaced by a more chemically sophisticated substance, creating the chemical bond that we observe today in DNA.
Expect a paper on it to be released in approximately three months with all the details.
posted by insomnia_lj
on Nov 6, 2005 -
66 comments
