Building Stonehenge

Wally Wallington of Flint, Michigan, explores simple technologies to move great weights: blocks, buildings, and stone columns. Check out the video in “Stonehenge Reloaded.”

You csn learn more st the Forgotten Technology Web site.

Saint Che?

Aydın Örstan at Snail’s Tales has a note about “Saint Ernesto” in the The Creation of a God.

In the Bolivian town of Vallegrande, where Che’s body was displayed, he has achieved the status of a deity:

“In this region, images of Che hang next to images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Pope John Paul II and Bolivia’s President Evo Morales. Stories of miracles have mushroomed.”
…
“We have a faith, a confidence in Che. When I go to bed and when I wake up, I first pray to God and then I pray to Che – and then, everything is all right.”

This is a fine example of how saints, deities, gods and religions, for that matter, have always been created.

[Read more.]

Germs mutate rapidly in space

Perhaps that should just be, “Germs mutate rapidly,” and it could be a lead article for my magazine Duh: the Magazine of the Obvious. However, an experiment in the space shuttle last year showed that Salmonella tripled in virulence during 24 hours of reproduction in microgravity, acccording to the Times online. The bacteria were allowed to multiply for 24 hours and then preserved. At the same time, an identical, control experiment was conducted on Earth. Mark Henderson, science editor, had this to report:

Analysis at the end of the flight showed that the salmonella flown in space had changes in the expression of 167 genes. When used to infect animals, the space-grown bacteria proved to be three times more likely to cause disease than those grown on Earth.

The research, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified particular changes in gene expression that were linked to an important regulatory protein called Hfq.

This result disproves William Dembski’s Intelligent Design suggestion that important biological changes are too unlikely to happen in a measureable length of time.
The bacterium in question is Salmonella enterica Typhimurium, a particular strain or “serovar” of S. enterica which causes food poisoning. Its genome has been sequenced. (The image is from the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.)

TJX mishandled private data

Federal and Albertan privacy commissioners have found that TJX mis-handled customers’ data: it stored too much private data and kept it for too long. It was both forseeable and predictable that someone would, or could, break through their security and steal that data.

“The company collected too much personal information, kept it too long and relied on weak encryption technology to protect it — putting the privacy of millions of its customers at risk,” federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said Tuesday. … the company breached federal and Alberta privacy laws…. The company must make numerous changes to the way it collects and uses customer data.

TJX Companies is the parent company of retail stores Winners and HomeSense. The breach resulted in the loss of personal information belonging to 45.7 million customers more than two years ago; but the company did not report the loss until January, 2007. It’s hard to fathom why they wouldn’t warn people that their credit card numbers might be known so that the cards could be cancelled.