Nov 27 2008

Open Thread

 

Thanks for all the thread.

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    • Edger on November 27, 2008 at 5:34 pm
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    • Edger on November 28, 2008 at 12:37 am
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    RawStory

    Robotics expert builds android twin to study the soul

    A Japanese inventor’s latest creation is a robot double of himself.

    Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro tells CNN’s Tokyo correspondent Kyung Lah that he sees his creation, dubbed the Geminoid, partly as an opportunity to have a presence when not actually present, essentially being in two places at once, and also as a chance to study human behavior along with furthering his knowledge of androids.

    “At first you may feel strange about the android,” Ishiguro told Reuters. “However, once you are drawn into a conversation, you will forget every difference and feel totally comfortable to speak with it and look it in the eyes.”

    • Edger on November 28, 2008 at 5:47 pm
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    OTTAWA – Researchers say they have located the world’s oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

    The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly “cultivated for psychoactive purposes,” rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

    The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

    The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

    “To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent,” says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

    Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.

    The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.

    The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.

    Researchers also could not determine whether the cannabis was smoked or ingested, as there were no pipes or other clues in the tomb of the shaman, who was about 45 years old.

    • Edger on November 28, 2008 at 6:46 pm
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    In a personal and wide-ranging interview conducted by his sister about his legacy, his faith and the influence of his father, President George W. Bush said he hopes to be remembered as a liberator of the Iraqi people.

    “I’d like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” Bush told his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, in a conversation recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

    An excerpt of the interview was aired on National Public Radio Thursday, and the White House released additional excerpts with both the president and first lady Laura Bush today.

    “I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process,” Bush said, according to White House excerpts.

    …

    Bush said his No Child Left Behind policy, which has been widely criticized by educators as too focused on test scores, is one of his significant achievements.

    “I think the No Child Left Behind Act is one of the significant achievements of my administration because we said loud and clear to educators, parents and children that we expect the best for every child, that we believe every child can learn, and that in return for Federal money we expect there to be an accountability system in place to determine whether every child is learning to read, write, and add and subtract,” he said.

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