12 Jan 2004
Prions: When Proteins Attack

Prions as "Ice-9" ... interesting article. More accurate than much of the pap that passes for "science reporting" in the popular press.

These proteins are in our bodies, but something can cause prions to turn into malicious brain killers. Baffled scientists search for causes, treatments and a cure. By Randy Dotinga.

(link) [Wired News]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

MySQL expands open-source database

Look out, Oracle! This was one of the last remaining "gotchas" in MySQL, one of the few features of the "big guys" that it lacked.

The company releases a developer version of MySQL 5.0, which can create and run stored procedures, a feature common to commercial databases.

(link) [CNET News.com - Front Door]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Researchers seek to clone 'mad cow disease' resistant cattle

Oh yeah, this is a solution - NOT! To eliminate "mad cow" there's no need to engineer a "happy cow" - we can make the cows we've got very happy if we'd just stop force feeding them meat. They're herbivores, for Pete's sake! What a concept! Of course, it would seriously interfere with corporate plans to industrialize all of Nature. So we'd best take the corporate approach and engineer an new cow.

Scientists are trying to clone cattle that are genetically incapable of developing "Mad Cow Disease." As federal and state government officials grapple with strategies to limit the economic and health risks associated with the troublesome discovery of the nation's first case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) – or "Mad Cow Disease"-- scientists in Virginia are conducting important research with the little understood molecules believed to cause the deadly brain-wasting disease.

(link) [Science Blog]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

MIT Technology Review Slams IPv6

Slashdot (and the posters thereupon) slams the article, but I find it to be a thoroughly realistic assessment of the "state of the art" - not only technologically, but politically as well.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Witchcraft Medicine

Jordsvin posted this review to several Heathen mailing lists this morning: it was so good I had to reproduce it here.

Witchcraft Medicine written by the eminent ethno-botanist and anthropologist Christian Rätsch Ph.D., the art historian Claudia Müller-Ebeling Ph.D., and the poet-gardener-herbalist Wolf Dieter Storl Ph.D. has been recently published in English by Inner Traditions. The translation was done by Annabel Lee.

Quote from the back cover from Daniel Pinchbeck:

"Witchcraft Medicine is a work of brilliant and passionate scholarship, fabulously illustrated, that recovers the lost knowledge of the European shamanic tradition. It is both a guide and an enthusiastic ode to the visionary edge of the botanical realm."

The book is lavishly illustrated throughout. It divided into three distinct sections, the first is an overview on the history of Europeans, their medicines, and their relations with plants and the worlds beyond. It begins in the Stone Age and ends in contemporary Southern Germany with organic farmers in the Black Forest influenced by Rudolph Steiner. He discusses the symbolism and ritual use of the most important and popular plants of Central Europe and how they were/are used in midwifery, for births and deaths, for medicine, for protection, for animals, fertility, and for pleasure.

The second part, by Rätsch, examines places in texts - about Hecate's and Medea's activities in antiquity through the three witches in Macbeth where transformations, rituals, healing, medicine, and spells are mentioned and ponders which plants might have played a role. Contrary to popular modern scholarship, Rätsch believes that shamanism, religious experience, and heathen rituals were inseparable from the sacred "plants of the gods" and he seeks to establish which plants were being referred to based on decades of personal experience and scholarship. He also discusses, and provides speculative (but certainly useable and potent) recipes for, many different traditional European shamanic blends, in particular the notorious "witches' salves" and "flying ointments" along with the "elixirs of youth."

The third section considers the different ways in which witches and the Virgin Mary are depicted in northern European art of the renaissance and which plants were associated with both. Müller-Ebeling shows how all that was wild, natural, uncivilized is depicted in the realm of the witch and all that is chaste and cultured in that of Mary. She discusses how the church demonized nature's healing powers and how artists were able to address the otherwise forbidden ideas of the natural forces in paintings of witches. The transformation from the goddess of fate into the disease-bringing witch is an underlying theme throughout this section.

The last section, "From the Inquisition to the Drug Laws" by Rätsch is rather a rant on one of his pet peeves - the demonization (initiated by christianity) of the traditional sacred plants of Europe, in particular hemp and poppies, which, as he points out, could be easily grown in anyone's window box, providing people with a near complete medicine chest made up of plants he considers to be the birthright of the Europeans. He questions who profits from the drug laws.

The outstanding characteristic of the plants and substances that are banned by the drug laws is their powerful effectiveness. They are some of the best medicines discovered by humans. They are not junk, like the medicines that are shoved over the counter at the pharmacy for a lot of money. They are potent... Opium is the best pain medication in the world. Hemp is probably the best anti-depressive... But who makes money from the healthy people - off the underlings who heal themselves with plants from their backyard or balcony gardens...? Ineffective medicine is a more certain source of income...

00:00 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Intel chips in on anti-SCO defense fund

An interesting move on the part of Intel ... they're obviously hedging some bets here, because if SCO actually manged a win (or, more likely, to simply continue the FUD for a while) then Intel will sell fewer chips. It's also fascinating in the fact that Microsoft (a major Intel partner) is one of the few companies to actually purchase a "Unix license" from SCO.

The chipmaker gets involved in Linux users' legal battle against SCO Group, contributing money to a defense fund designed to help them fight off suits.

(link) [CNET News.com - Front Door]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link