September 14, 2006, 7:01 PM CT

Why do We Need a Revolution for if We Cannot Dance

Again a long trip by bus, to Macedonia this time, the town of Struga on Lake Ohrid.Thirty Women in Black and a young bus driver. It is his first drive, he is cautious and it is a good thing too, because he saves the lives of several reckless fools in the narrow mountain roads where the speeding fines exceed those in Los Angeles but slow down nobody.We stop several times, for "a piss and a smoke." We have no local money,.

Macedonian denars, but we do have one dollar bills. A beer for a dollar, a piss for a dollar? The first one is cheap, the second tremendously expensive for such a rich natural environment with so few people.

This used to be my own country, and my heart still leaps at the beauty of these Yugoslav mountains. Only at the last moment did remember that I had to take my passport to Macedonia. America's Colorado was never this green. My ever-skeptical American friend says: it's pretty here, but I've seen prettier.

Still, Lake Ohrid is astounding even him. He says: this is ridiculously pretty. Green reeds are swaying on the wind and the waves are climbing the shore below our room. The glossy local postcards look dull in comparison to reality.

An Orthodox monastery stands next to our hotel on the lake. A sign says: in 1942 an illegal Communist meeting was held here. Tito's red star is still on the monastery and the nuns are proud of it. They also make an excellent brandy. My American friend asks how Macedonian-Orthodox nuns could also be revolutionary Marxist atheists. I have no explanation. Nobody is perfect, particularly in Balkan history.Toyguns.........

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September 14, 2006, 6:57 PM CT

Eclipsed Moon Rising Over England

Last Thursday, part of our Moon turned dark. The cause, this time, was not a partial lunar phase -- the Moon was full -- but rather that part of the Moon went into Earth's shadow. The resulting partial lunar eclipse was visible from the eastern Atlantic Ocean through Europe, Africa, and Asia and into the western Pacific Ocean. The darkest part of the lunar eclipse, when part of the Moon was completely shielded from sunlight, lasted about 90 minutes.

Pictured above, a partially eclipsed Moon is seen rising over an estate in Huddersfield, England. The above image was taken far away from the house in the foreground, as only this would allow it to appear as angularly small as the half-degree Moon far in the background. A setting twilight Sun lit the foreground. The next eclipse of the Moon will occur in March 2007.........

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September 14, 2006, 6:03 PM CT

Bank Robbers Meet Their Match

In the lead article of the September 2006 issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, Paul Musgrave tells the little-known story of how hundreds of Hoosiers in the 1920s and early 1930s became armed vigilantes, defending the state's banks against gangs of robbers.

Musgrave, assistant editor of the journal Foreign Affairs, writes that the combination of a state police force without adequate funding, staff or equipment, and a criminal class that could easily escape in high-speed automobiles, resulted in the loss of more than $1 million (equivalent to $10 million today) from state banks during the 1920s. In response to this crisis, the Indiana Bankers Association trained hundreds of bank employees and ordinary citizens to act as vigilantes -- pursuing, shooting and, if necessary, killing bank robbers.

This unusual type of vigilantism, sanctioned by local law enforcement and state business groups, was short-lived, eclipsed after 1933 by legislation that created a strong state police force. Other Midwest states, including Illinois, Michigan and Kansas, supported similar programs during this brief period.

The second article featured in the issue is an account by Fort Wayne, Ind., historian Peggy Seigel of a decades-long stuggle by that city's women to obtain the right to vote.........

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September 14, 2006, 4:45 AM CT

Serious Flaws In Electronic Voting Machines

A group of Princeton computer researchers said they created demonstration vote-stealing software that can be installed within a minute on a common electronic voting machine. The software can fraudulently change vote counts without being detected.

"We have created and analyzed the code in the spirit of helping to guide public officials so that they can make wise decisions about how to secure elections," says Edward Felten, the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, a new center at Princeton University that addresses crucial issues at the intersection of society and computer technology.

This interesting paper appears on the Web site for the Center for Information Technology Policy.

The scientists obtained the machine, a Diebold AccuVote-TS, from a private party in May. They spent the summer analyzing the machine and developing the vote-stealing demonstration.

"We observed that the machine is vulnerable to many extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces," wrote Felten and his co-authors, graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman.

In a 10-minute video on their Web site, the scientists demonstrate how the vote-stealing software works. The video shows the software sabotaging a mock presidential election between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. Arnold is reported as the winner even though Washington gets more votes. (The video is edited from a longer continuously shot video; the long single-shot version will be available for downloading from the center's site as well.).........

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September 14, 2006, 4:33 AM CT

Warming might affect polar bear population

Some travel agencies touting Arctic tours have been revving up their recent promotions to tourists about the increased likelihood they will spot polar bears in this region where several populations of polar bears live. As per researchers from NASA and the Canadian Wildlife Service, these increased Arctic polar bear sightings are probably correlation to retreating sea ice triggered by climate warming and not due to population increases as some may believe.

The new research suggests that progressively earlier breakup of the Arctic sea ice, stimulated by climate warming, shortens the spring hunting season for female polar bears in Western Hudson Bay and is likely responsible for the continuing fall in the average weight of these bears. As females become lighter, their ability to reproduce and the survival of their young decline. Also, as the bears become thinner, they are more likely to push into human settlements for food, giving the impression that the population is increasing. The study will be published this week in the recent issue of the Journal Arctic.

Claire Parkinson, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and Ian Stirling, a senior scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, Edmonton, Alberta, used NASA satellite observations captured from 1979 to 2004 to show the reduction in sea ice cover in several specific areas where there are known polar bear populations. In most of the areas studied, they observed that ice break-up in these areas has been occurring progressively earlier.........

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September 13, 2006, 9:53 PM CT

Arctic Sea Ice Diminishing Rapidly

The Arctic Ocean's perennial sea ice, which survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrank abruptly by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005, according to a newly published study. Researchers found that the loss of perennial ice in the East Arctic Ocean, above Europe and Asia, neared 50 percent during that time as some of the ice moved to the West Arctic Ocean, above North America.

The overall decrease in winter Arctic perennial sea ice totaled 730,000 square kilometers [280,000 square miles]--an area the size of Texas. Perennial ice can be three meters [10 feet] thick, or more. It was replaced in the winter by new, seasonal ice, which was only about 0.3 to two meters [one to seven feet] thick and more vulnerable to summer melt. The research was published 7 September in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The decrease in perennial ice raises the possibility that Arctic sea ice will retreat to another record low extent this year. This follows four summers of very low ice-cover, as observed by active and passive microwave instruments.

A team of seven scientists, led by Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used satellite data to measure the extent and distribution of perennial and seasonal sea ice in the Arctic. While the total area of all Arctic sea ice was stable in winter, the distribution of seasonal and perennial sea ice changed significantly.........

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September 13, 2006, 9:07 PM CT

Sensors Based On Carbon Nanotubes

A team of researchers from Arizona State University and Motorola Labs, the applied research arm of Motorola Inc., has developed sensors based on carbon nanotubes, microscopically small structures that posses excellent electronic properties. In early tests, the new devices detected the presence of heavy metal ions in water down to parts per trillion levels.

Specifically, the researchers developed a method for applying peptides to single walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) in field effect transistors.

"This is a fairly general sensor platform for all kinds of applications," said Nongjian Tao, an electrical engineering professor at Arizona State University and one of the researchers on the project. "We tested heavy metal ions in water, but the platform can be applied to many other areas to sense toxic chemicals in the air, or they can be used as biosensors when applied to medicine".

"Integration of nanosensors into devices and sensor networks will enable the detection of biological and chemical agents at very low concentrations, which could be vital in the areas of public safety and homeland security," added Vida Ilderem, vice president of the Embedded Systems Research Labs at Motorola, Tempe, Ariz.

The researchers report the advance in a paper, "Tuning the chemical selectivity of SWNT-FETs for detection of heavy metal ions," which would be published in the journal Small. An early view of the article is available at the journal's web site (www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/109627347).........

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September 13, 2006, 9:04 PM CT

Dieting More Likely to Cause Stress Fractures

Female college athletes on low-calorie diets could be putting themselves at risk for stress fractures, as per new Saint Louis University research published in this month's The American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Scientists studied risk factors for exercise-related leg pain, including stress fractures in women participating in four popular fall sports - cross-country running, field hockey, soccer and volleyball.

Women with "disordered eating," which includes eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia but more generally refers to insufficient caloric intake, were more likely to develop stress fractures as a result of decreased estrogen production, says researcher Mark Reinking, PT, Ph.D., chairman of the department of physical treatment at Saint Louis University's Doisy College of Health Sciences.

"When people expend more calories than they consume, they release fewer hormones, which slows down menstrual cycles. This decreases estrogen in the body, which is responsible for bone development," says Reinking, also chairman of the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties.

Leg pain is one of the most common problems afflicting athletes, Reinking says.

"It causes people to miss practices and competitions, and I wanted to understand if two people were undergoing the same exercise regime, why only one of them would have leg pain," he says. "It's not as simple as 'Run less' or 'Change your shoes every 300 miles.' It's a complex problem, and you can't prevent something if you don't know what causes it".........

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September 13, 2006, 8:13 PM CT

Spring Fashion Week 2007 Day 4

New American designer Hilton Hollis has been getting quite a bit of press lately, so when I received an email from a reader about his collection, I decided to take a peek. From a design perspective, the line doesn't look like anything new, but from a pr, branding and overall marketing perspective, what's interesting about Hollis' line is that he is directly targeting those who purchase in the mid price range-skipping higher end customers all together.

This is an interesting approach because it has the possiblity of challenging fashion's hierachy. So what's this hierachy? As per the wonderful blog, Fashion Incubator (who also evaluated the Hollis line), here's the basic breakdown of the hierachy (I added in the mass market category) and my very rough definitions of each category:

Fashion Hierachy

• Haute Couture- "High Fashion" (Chanel, Dior, made to wear items from top, commonly Parisian designers). A much over used term.
• Designer RTW (Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, pre -made and sold on the racks).
• Bridge (not quite Chanel, but not quite Jones New York. This term is used a lot and the line between bridge and contemporary seems to be blurred).
• Contemporary ( Basically the stuff sold at the department stores and includes designers like Tracey Reese and Nanette Lepore to Ellen Tracy and Dana Buchman).
........

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September 13, 2006, 8:03 PM CT

Oh Kirsten

Most of the online chatter about these pictures have been about how silly she looks flipping off the photographers or about Spiderman reshoots, but I am more concerned about the bag she is carrying.

Why on earth would Kirsten Dunst be carrying around almost the exact same Vera Bradley bag (or worse, a Vera knock off) that I myself had circa 2000? Now at the time I was pleased as punch with my little cotton bag. It cost me a bundle of my recent college grad salary, had fantastic pockets, and at the time it was the height of Boston preppy fashion.

But it is now 2006 and Kirsten must today have a WAY larger bank account then I did back then. And while I will admit to still having a soft spot for the Vera's (my weekend bag is a Miller in Java Blue) this is really unacceptable for someone rich and famous. Kirsten needs to get herself into Louis Vuitton or Prada store ASAP!

From the bag blog.........

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