The Author's Spot

A hint of the theme of my first book:

2007-10-24T06:55:00.001-07:00

The study of genetic brain function must be conducted along with environmental factors.

Specific environmental accommodations are required for specific genetic brain function. When a suitable environment is not provided it should not be a surprise when dysfunction and often immoral coping/reactive behaviors result!

How is resistance, depression, anxiety, rage and violence not to be expected if a person is forced to live in a way that is psychologically abusive to them? It is much like placing a wild animal in a small cage and punishing it for instinctive behavior by further limiting it's access to a natural way of life? What is to be expected from intelligent humans who are treated as idiots by peers or artists who are not allowed to be creative, or active children who are forced to sit all day... especially when their natural behaviors are scorned, punished and a cause for telling them they are immoral? Why should we be surprised if anyone such individuals grow up hostile?

When we study genetic intelligence we should both take into consideration the environmental affects on DNA as well as hold in our hearts the intrinsic value of every individual regardless of genetics. Only then can mankind resist the past tendency to use science to build more cages for people and further abuse those who are not 'as good' as the rest.

I believe genetic research needs to be done on how we think, but if we are to be moral agents, we must use this knowledge to help those who are wired differently than the norm by not just declaring them unfit for the normal environment but rather, attempting to create environments which suit them best...

Every individual has an inalienable right to freedom and to flourish.

Questioning genetic intelligence is not racism

By JAMES WATSON

*SNIP*

One in three people looking for a job in temporary employment bureaus in Los Angeles is a psychopath or a sociopath. Is this a consequence of their environment or their genetic components? DNA sequencing should give us the answer. The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the

service of knowledge and greater understanding.

In finding out the extent to which genes influence moral behavior, we shall also be able to understand how genes influence intellectual capacities.

Right now, at my institute in the U.S. we are working on gene-caused failures in brain development that frequently lead to autism and schizophrenia. We may also find that differences in these respective brain development genes also lead to differences in our abilities to carry out different mental tasks.

In some cases, how these genes function may help us to understand variations in IQ, or why some people excel at poetry but are terrible at mathematics.

All too often people with high mathematical abilities have autistic traits. The same gene that gives some people such great mathematical abilities may also lead to autistic behavior. This is why, in studying autism and schizophrenia, we believe we shall come very close to a better understanding of intelligence and, therefore, of the differences in intelligence.

We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes that determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science.

*snip*

Genetic Progress and my novels predictions

2007-10-24T06:53:00.000-07:00

In my novel genetic enhancements are very common, and here is an article about research in this area:

Genetic engineer could make doping obsolete

Speed, strength and endurance — the qualities of every athletic competition — could develop on a new front that is virtually undetectable and involves no use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Several experts in genetic engineering told congressional staff members that information on the connections between genes and performance is accumulating so quickly that it will inevitably lead to a day when illegal use of steroids and other strategies are replaced by genetic engineering.

Schemes to install genes that stimulate greater production of red blood cells or greater muscle growth already are being promoted, said University of California, San Diego geneticist Theodore Friedmann.

“They’re clearly hyped, they’re clearly overblown, they’re clearly wrong, in my opinion,” he said, “but this science is inevitable, and it’s not too early to think about public policy in this area.”

My progress

2007-10-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

I have spent the last couple of months reading, editing, and organizing chapters. First I formated in a standard I read about on a writers forum I started to go: couriernew, 12 font, double spaced, footer with title, chapter and page...and then I printed it. Over 1000 pages, wordcount: 282,831 And that's with 3 chapters not written.

Then I wrote up a basic outline and printed out a page for each chapter to write notes on as I read through it. I marked what I really liked, crossed through anything that wasn't necessary, checked the bits that needed to be rewritten or condensed and wrote down anything I needed to think about. Just by doing that I was able to cut out nearly 100 full pages, maybe more... which is significant because that's not counting large sections that were marked to dump but left in the pile because I wanted something that was on the page.

It was very interesting reading it from start to end like that, it was the first time I ever did it and I saw very clearly how most of the subplots were just distracting and a few of the secondary characters in them were unnecessary. So they are gone. I also noticed where my main characters weren't coming off as I wanted and some of the backstory was either not needed in the book (but stays in my brain), or was redundant or overly expanded. So a lot of that is gone as well. HOWEVER, I am considering something of an appendix. we'll see.

Reading this straight through also helped me focus on the major theme I have decided on this summer and figure out ways to bring that out more. It does mean rewriting chapters that I thought were complete... but you have to do what you have to do!

Another help of the process was seeing/feeling how long the chapters were and figuring out how to break them up and shuffle them around to a digestible size and logical sequence.

After the preliminary print editing process, I sat down with the outline and revamped it totally... adding in chapters here, moving chapters there... I wrote down the date and time of each chapter and the location of each character. It was time consuming, but I found a few spots that needed to be tweeked, and was glad to see I hadn't painted myself into a corner!

I also mapped out my big bang finish, which was something I had only grasped vaguely.

So, now I am working chapter by chapter again, reading out loud to make sure it flows and captures the mood I am trying to create. I have completed chapters 1 & 2 and am writing a new chapter 3 this week.

For those who are following my progress and interested in the book, I thank you for taking the time to read this!! :)

Schools Starts this Week!!

2007-09-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

It's been about 3 months since I wrote anything besides quick notes in my tiny marble pads and while I've done extensive planning and figured out plot angles, character archs and even the titles for my novel trilogy, I am SOOO ready to start full time writing again.

This week I'm going to be printing out all 16 finished chapters and reading them straight through with a big yellow highlighter and a pen for detailed notes. I'm very, very excited. I miss my characters very much...

That said, I came across this article this morning that is pretty much what I'm predicting in my novel, but instead of lamenting the end of cinima, I'm actually coming up with a way to do it better...

http://news.scotsman.com/entertainment.cfm?id=1399142007

Only lifting selected quotes:

Internet 'killing cinema', says director Scott
RAYMOND HAINEY

THE Hollywood director, Ridley Scott, warned yesterday that new technology is killing off the big-screen experience. The Oscar-winning County Durham-born movie mogul said mobile phones and computers threatened movie-making on an epic scale.

*****

He said: "People sit there watching a movie on a tiny screen. You can't beat it, you've got to join it and deal with it and also get competitive with it. But we try to do films which are in support of cinema, in a large room with good sound and a big picture."

However, Scott admitted: "I'm sure we're on a losing wicket, but we're fighting technology. While it has been wonderful in many aspects, it also has some big negative downsides."

Former Edinburgh Film Festival director Mark Cousins said Scott's prognosis was too gloomy.

****

Mr Cousins said: "We still go to big cinemas at weekends collectively, but we also watch movies individually at home with our big TVs and sound systems."

He added that the message was more important than the medium. Mr Cousins said: "I take the view that content is king - it's the story and it's not what format it presented on. That has always been the case."

And he added: "There has been an increase in more specialist movie houses and the types of films which are doing well are documentaries, which never used to be the case, while animation is making a comeback."

Basically, what I predict will likely happen is that there will not only be more specialist movie houses, but genre houses. These will be similar to sports bars, but have mood for the type of 'movies' they show. And to top that off, more entertainment will be interactive like American Idol - and these genre houses will project epic reality TV broadcasts on their mega screens. These shows will have an internet componant where fans can form communities on line and subscribe to archives of the episodes and behind the scenes (like Wrestling) But then people will gladly pay to watch a show they could see at home, only they prefer to be with other fans and an intense 'club' like atmosphere.

This isn't what the entire novel is about, it's just the career of one of the main characters - he's a gladiator in a role playing game and he has fans the world over.

AHHH!!! I only have two more days before I can start working!!! I love my kids, and I've had a great summer with them, but I'm SOO excited I can barely stand it! *L*

Cloned Burgers

2007-07-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

In a few posts ago "Genetic Engineering of our Plants" I put up an article that outlined the prospect of losing the variety of genes found in wild plant species because of over breeding and genetic engineering. The idea was that by filtering out 'unwanted' traits in favor of more desirable ones, the genetic pool can get so concentrated with the same DNA that it becomes difficult to find plants that contain traits which are needed when something new happens.

Such as, oh I don't know - climate change? Plants and animals have been evolving on a planet that undergoes ice ages and major changes in climates. The species that have survived contain in them the ability to adapt to these changes so that wild animals will have young with a broad genetic possibilities, increasing the chances that they will have SOMETHING unique in them to help them survive the changes...

When humans muck up the system by breeding out the diversity, they are upping the chances that they will produce plants and animals that require a certain environment to survive. Sure, they may be SUPER plants and animals that will thrive in that environment - but what if it changes? And what happens when we have to go back to the drawing board and find wild animals and plants with diverse genes and they aren't there because we didn't let them survive.

The other problem of creating genetic mutated animals and plants is when they can't breed on their own, or if they do their offspring are mutations. The supply is then controlled not by the owners of said plants and animals who can build an independant business, but rather by the people who own the genetic map - and what happens then if they lose it or, worse, if someone decides they don't want to sell seeds this year, or if the farmer won't pay enough, or they play favorites and shut out free enterprise?

In the following article this process is being taken yet another step further - and again it's all being sold to farmers based on money... you can produce more product (they mean animals and plants) if you use genetically altered.

And of COURSE they say it won't hurt anyone to eat it - though they don't really know this... just like they didn't know that people would get sick and die from eating cows that were eating... cows. (Mad Cow Disease)

Having a large heard of identically tasting, big, meaty, easy to control animals who grow up faster and produce more milk sounds great - but if they are all clones, the diversity is completely gone. COMPLETELY.

If I was a conspiracy theorist I would say there is some underlying plan to do this so that someone can be in control of the food and thus control of the people. But I don't think people are that smart to plan ahead to take over - I think they are instead that stupid to pave the way for some evil oppertunist.

We should farm cloned animals says Dolly expert
By SEAN POULTER - More by this author
Dolly: Next it was pigs and cows

The creator of Dolly the sheep has called for farmers to take up cloning as a way of producing cheap food.

Professor Keith Campbell believes the country's farms should be populated by superstrong, super-sized offspring of clones.

The U.S. expects to be eating clone-farmed burgers, pork and bacon within two years, and supporters of the method say Europe must follow suit.

The Daily Mail revealed earlier this year how the daughter of a U.S. clone cow had been born on a British farm for the first time, making Frankenstein Farming a reality.

The intention is that the cow - Dundee Paradise - will be used to help breed Britain's future milking cow herds.

Professor Campbell said yesterday that this should be the first step to a far wider use of cloned animals to produce food from cattle, pigs, chicken and sheep.

Campaigners insist that meat and milk from cloned offspring is identical to the food in supermarkets and should not be labelled.

However, any attempt to deny families the right to decide whether they want to eat food produced in this way would be highly controversial.

One of the biggest concerns is the high number of clone-animal pregnancies that lead to abnormalities, miscarriages and stillbirths.

Even in the most successful cloning systems, twice as many piglets are born dead - around

20per cent - as with existing breeding. The clones could be created from cells taken from the ears of prized animals or even bodies going through a slaughterhouse.

Clone-offspring cows would be bigger and able to produce more milk than those from current breeding techniques.

Pigs might also be much bigger, leaner or faster growing, so making them easier and cheaper to produce.

Professor Campbell, director of animal bioscience at Nottingham University, said cloning is a useful extension of existing selective breeding, which includes artificial insemination and embryo transfer.

"It is just another technique that we can add to accelerate genetic improvements to farm animal species," he added. "Cloning allows us to multiply elite animals.

"We have achieved the ability to clone a whole variety of animals and animal species. In farm animals, we have got cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and horses.

"In my opinion the ability to integrate cloning into the food production line should be allowed to farmers nowadays."

He said there is 'no conceivable risk' in eating food produced from the off-spring of clones, suggesting the only barrier to the technology is public perception.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration is expected to give approval for the technology, without a requirement for labelling, later this year.

Dr Simon Best, chairman of the Bioindustry Association, believes labelling is unnecessary saying: "I don't think there is a scientific reason for doing it."

He said: "There is a whole load of things that the public could want to know, but you end up with information overload.

The policy chief of the organic farming group, the Soil Association, dismissed the claims as 'propaganda'.

Peter Melchett said: "The fact that supporters of cloning are not prepared to support labelling and want to keep the whole thing secret says it all. It stinks."

The European Food Safety Authority launched an inquiry into the issue of clone farming following the Daily Mail revelations earlier this year.

But will take 18-24 months to report and there is no effectively system to police the introduction of clone farming.

Organicaly grown spaceships...

2007-07-09T05:37:00.000-07:00

I've decided to sadly and disapointingly take the summer off, yet again. The kids go to bed at 8:30 for the younger and 10 for the older, and I can't start writing until too late. It's just too hard to find time to write and it hurts too badly to get to the end of the day and/or week and be too tired to even think straight. I'm still doing research though, and taking notes for ideas I'm having to refine the characters and plot.

On to the article....

In some Sci-fi stories aliens have devised ways to grow space ships - I've seen it on Star Trek and I believe the Taelon ships on Earth Final Conflict were also 'grown'... I know some of the other technology they had was.

According to the article below, genetic engineers are already taking the pieces of different puzzles and putting them together to make a new picture: such as glow in the dark pigs and super meaty cows or combining different types of fruit for new flavors or better resistance to pests and diseases. But now they are on the path to create their own puzzle pieces... the results of which are such extremes as to have an acorn that grows into a house. Synthetic fuel is also mentioned. How cool!

This biological technology is somewhat already incorporated into my novel in that characters are able to grow new arms or the arms/legs/skin/hair/feathers of other creatures should they desire for either cosmetic or utilitarian purposes. I had put in the surgical ability to transplant bionic technology if something inorganic was desired. However, this really opens my mind to other possibilities. Growing a bone and flesh version of an extravigant tool or weapon, for instance. Or growing trees and plants to serve as custome made shelters for the chimera and hybrids living in the kennels... or transportation devices like a sub for underwater traveling.

Of course there is the very exciting plot possibility of genetic mutations that are other than the scientists devised... ;)

>Genetic Engineers Who Don’t Just Tinker

FORGET genetic engineering. The new idea is synthetic biology, an effort by engineers to rewire the genetic circuitry of living organisms.

The ambitious undertaking includes genetic engineering, the now routine insertion of one or two genes into a bacterium or crop plant. But synthetic biologists aim to rearrange genes on a much wider scale, that of a genome, or an organism’s entire genetic code. Their plans include microbes modified to generate cheap petroleum out of plant waste, and, further down the line, designing whole organisms from scratch.

Synthetic biologists can identify a network of useful genes on their computer screens by downloading the gene sequences filed in DNA data banks. But a DNA molecule containing these various genes and their control elements would be a chain of hundreds of thousands of DNA units in length. Though human cells effortlessly duplicate a genome of three billion units, the longest piece of DNA synthesized so far is just 35,000 units long.

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., hope to take a giant stride in synthetic biology by creating a piece of DNA 580,076 units in length from simple chemicals, chiefly the material that constitutes DNA’s four-letter chemical alphabet. This molecule would be an exact copy of the genome of a small bacterium. Dr. Venter says he then plans to insert it into a bacterial cell. If this man-made genome can take over the cell’s functions, Dr. Venter should be able to claim he has made the first synthetic cell.

Such an achievement could suggest some new plateau has been reached in human control of life and evolution. But Dr. Venter’s synthetic genome will probably be seen to represent a feat of copying evolution’s genetic programming, not of creating new life itself.

Synthetic biologists, as they survey all the new genes and control elements whose DNA sequences are now accumulating in data bases, seem to feel extraordinary power is almost within their grasp.

“Biology will never be the same,” Thomas F. Knight of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wrote recently in describing the new engineering discipline he sees as emerging from it.

Adherents of the new discipline held their third annual conference last month in Zurich but their creations are still at the toy rocket stage. A dish of bacteria that generates a bull’s eye pattern in response to the chemicals in its environment. A network of genes that synthesizes the precursor chemical to artemisin, an anti-malaria drug. “The understanding of networks and pathways is really in its infancy and will be a challenge for decades,” says James J. Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University.

That hasn’t stopped synthetic biologists from dreaming. “Grow a house” is on the to-do list of the M.I.T. Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches. “Take over Mars. And then Venus. And then Earth” —the last items on this modest agenda.

Most people in synthetic biology are engineers who have invaded genetics. They have brought with them a vocabulary derived from circuit design and software development that they seek to impose on the softer substance of biology. They talk of modules — meaning networks of genes assembled to perform some standard function — and of “booting up” a cell with new DNA-based instructions, much the way someone gets a computer going.

The first practical applications of synthetic biology may not be so far off. “The real killer app for this field has become bioenergy,” Dr. Collins says. Under the stimulus of high gas prices, synthetic biologists are re-engineering microbes to generate the components of natural gas and petroleum. Whether this can be done economically remains to be seen. But one company, LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., says it is close to that goal. Its re-engineered microbe “produces hydrocarbons that look, smell and function” very similarly to those in petroleum, said Stephen del Cardayre, the company’s vice president for research.

Synthetic biologists are well aware that, like any new technology, theirs can be used for good or ill, and they have encouraged open discussion of possible risks at their annual meetings.

One possible danger is bioterrorism. According to a report in Science, Blue Heron Biotechnology, a DNA synthesis company, has already received requests, which it rejected, for DNA sequences encoding a plant toxin and part of the smallpox virus. Synthetic biologists hope that self-regulation will head off government supervision that could be expected to come in a field that has such potential for mischief.

Evolution continually refines its creations by means of the naturally occurring mutations in DNA that are the raw material of natural selection. This propensity to innovate may not be so welcome to synthetic biologists, who seek stable systems. But they hope to spot mutations with error-detection algorithms and then go back to the original cells. “You can think of it as a re-boot,” said Ron Weiss, a synthetic biologist at Princeton.

Even if the mutation problem can be squelched, it remains to be seen how far synthetic biologists can wrest evolution’s strange system to entirely different purposes and whether the human organism is one they will propose to debug and upgrade.

Local Currency/Credits to encourage local spending...

2007-06-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

Just read about a New England town that has convinced people to invest in local currency that isn't good anywhere besides that town.

This is one way the colonies, cities and corporations in my novel keep profits within their borders. Cash is worth more because you can buy anything with it, but some things within borders can't be bought unless you exchange it - for a loss.

New age town embraces dollar alternative
Tue Jun 19, 2007 10:50AM EDT
By Scott Malone

GREAT BARRINGTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A walk down Main Street in this New England town calls to mind the pictures of Norman Rockwell, who lived nearby and chronicled small-town American life in the mid-20th Century.

So it is fitting that the artist's face adorns the 50 BerkShares note, one of five denominations in a currency adopted by towns in western Massachusetts to support locally owned businesses over national chains.

"I just love the feel of using a local currency," said Trice Atchison, 43, a teacher who used BerkShares to buy a snack at a cafe in Great Barrington, a town of about 7,400 people. "It keeps the profit within the community."

...

"BerkShares are cash, and so people have transferred their cash habits to BerkShares," said Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, a nonprofit group that set up the program. "They might have 50 in their pocket, but not 150. They're buying their lunch, their coffee, a small birthday present."

The Top of the Economic Food: Chain Oil vs. Corn

2007-06-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

Oil is at the top - the highest desired commodity that everyone wants and needs and is scarse enough and hard enough to get that prices can go up and people have very little they can do except pay it... and keeping the prices low has become a huge source of strife for the entire world as nations fight to maintain control over this resource.

And because oil is the top source of energy, when oil prices go up, so does virtually everything else that requires energy to be created or transported.

Corn is closing in on Oil because ethonal made from corn is starting to replace Oil as a means for energy, BUT it's still used for feeding people and the animals who feed people. As people who make ethonal buy up the corn, they can afford to pay higher prices because people are USED to paying more for energy and aren't going to demand lower prices. But the people who feed people are dealing with a comodity that everyone is used to being very low in price, and for which there are alternatives (eating other things) so when they raise their prices, people eat other things.

The result is that our food sources are going to start drying up if ethanol is selected as an alternative to oil.

It's already causing a big problem in China, as their economy is doing better and more people are eating pork, at the same time the prices are rising because of a shortage of pigs as farmers simply can't afford the feed.

And because pigs eat corn and pork is a staple in the diet of Chinese workers who make American goods... well, you get the picture.

Rise in China’s Pork Prices Signals End to Cheap Output

The crisis over pork prices in China, like the jolt many Americans feel when gasoline prices jump, offers one example of how prices can suddenly soar. The Chinese government is struggling to cope — including deliberating whether to sell a snuffling, smelly strategic reserve of hundreds of thousands of live pigs kept at special subsidized farms for precisely the shortage the country is now facing.

Chinese officials offer several reasons for the high pig prices. The cost of animal feed has risen by one-quarter in the last year, partly because more corn is being made into ethanol and partly because more prosperous workers are eating more meat, which requires more animal feed.

Pork is a critical source of protein for Chinese of all incomes, but particularly for low-income workers like those who keep American and European families well supplied with $49 DVD players and other popular consumer products.

If there isn't some sort of top down change (meaning using something besides ethnaol or using something besides corn to make ethanol) there are several different possiblities of how this is all going to play out. People and animals will have to start eating something besides corn, more people will have to start growing corn to meet the supply, the prohibitive cost of trinkets from China will make buying them more expensive and people will stop hording junk and spewing it into landfills, people will stop feeling a need to travel so much and communities will become more inner focused....

Thoser are just a few possibilities. It'll be interesting to see what will really happen, but I know how it's going to happen in my book and I find these kinds of things really fascinating... ;)

Vermont group wants to secede from U.S.

2007-06-04T05:39:00.000-07:00

The novel takes place at a time where there are no longer a 'United States' and instead the states operate independantly. I've made this prediction as a possible outcome for the way things are going because of the way Individual State preferences are being overlooked/ignored in favor of cohesive Federal System. Earlier in the blog I pointed out the "Nation within a Nation" in Canada where a city (Quebec) has succeeded in peacefully declaring itself independant from the nation within which it resides. There is still cooperation between Canada and Quebec, but Quebecians get to make up their own rules and don't have to listen to Canada, but they enjoy the protection of Canada (which actually enjoys the protection of the U.S., but that's besides the point)

So when I came across this article this morning, my stomach got a few butterflies... it seems there are people in Vermont who are ready to do things their own way. It's not at all surprising to me, and they are such a small number that I doubt it'll happen anytime soon, BUT the fact that people are thinking about it as an alternative should send up warning flags to Federalists(those who would like to see the U.S. continue on the trend toward a centralized government.)

In Vermont, nascent secession movement gains traction

About 300 people turned out for a 2005 secession convention in the Statehouse, and plans for a second one are in the works. A poll this year by the University of Vermont's Center for Rural Studies found that 13 percent of those surveyed support secession, up from 8 percent a year before.

"The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable -- it's too big, it's too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens," said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.

"Congress and the executive branch are being run by the multinationals. We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war. If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what's left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire."

Such movements have a long history. Key West, Fla., staged a mock secession from America in the 1980s. The Town of Killington, Vt., tried to break away and join New Hampshire in 2004, and Hawaii, Alaska, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Texas all have some form of secession organizations today.

The Vermont movement, which is being pushed by several different groups, has been bubbling up for years but has gained new traction in the wake of disenchantment over the Iraq war, rising oil prices and the formation of the pro-secession groups

Right now most people are going to think this is a 'cute' idea to get attention and try to push for more local power - the idea that the States could function alone has a lot of problems, economically and militarily...

But our country was founded on an idea, not a rigid method of carrying out that idea. So to change the structure of how democracy is carried out to make it function more alligned to the idea of democracy, IMO doesn't sound like that far of a stretch... it's just getting people to think differently and rationally about what makes the most sense in the modern world.

As this site on global guerrillas points out, modern warfare is changing as larger nations become vulnerable to attack from smaller cells of independant military forces.

Remember: Vulnerability to disruption accelerates with size while the capacity to disrupt (using these methods) is scale-free (based on self-replicating computer resources and thereby within the budget of any state, no matter how small)

The current U.S. strategy of a strong centralized military that fights wars on other lands is starting to not be exactly what we need anymore. And the size of our country requires states and federal police groups to work together to thwart attacks on cities within our borders. If this continues to work, there will be no need for succession based on protection from terror threats. But as soon as a state or city starts to believe they could keep themselves safe with their own way of doing things, the dependance we have on the Federal government to protect us could disolve and there's nothing like fear to drive people to do something to protect themselves.

I should note that I'm not for or against sucession or keeping the U.S. federally oriented, I do think states should be given a bit more leeway in writing their own laws, but that is happening already... Mostly I find the entire situation fascinating, especially considering I created a predicted outcome for an unusual setting in my novel and many of these predictions are starting to come true!

Note on writing: I wrote another chapter on Saturday... and plan to finish it up today. So only 2 more to go for the first book!! very exciting.

Three Chapters left to write!!!

2007-06-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

Or four, depending on how well I can condense the final one. *L*

I can't believe how much things have changed in the book in just a couple years, I had about 13 chapters done at one point and then rewrote EVERYTHING. It's the same basic story, but much richer with better to understand backgrounds on the characters.

There will be 2 more books to go along with it (at least) and this one is ending up at 16-17 chapters. So far I have the second book outlined to chapter 10 and I've started to take really good notes, and DATE them in a little pocket sized marble memo. I took it with me on my trip to Grand Junction, Colorado and Moab, Utah and was able to take the time away from home and the family to really think about where I wanted to go. It was an incredibly refreshing time and I'm so excited and have a lot of momentum built up. (Today I wrote 1/2 a chapter and still managed to be here for the refridgerator repair man (Did you know you gotta clean that dust out of the back vent every 6 months?), go to my son's school party, pick up the kids and take them to little league!)

I'm hoping to finish up editing this chapter tonight and then move on to the next one on Monday - the kids only have 4 more full days of school and then they're home for the summer. Since they are older it should be easier to write now, and bless their hearts, they are really getting into the idea that Mommy is writing a book. As they both learn to read I think it's meant more to them - especially the older one. It's made me think about the content of the book though, I don't want to write for children, it's not natural for me and the story itself is dark in places - because what humans do to each other is very dark. over all it should be an uplifting tale, and I'll probably just wait until they are in their teens to let them read it.

I'm so bummed about the layout of my blog, ever since the change, my template hasn't worked, and I don't know enough HTML to figure it out! Grrrr...

All for now...

Julia

New warfare

2007-05-31T09:20:00.000-07:00

Russia knows how to prevent global warming - academic

Talk about scary! At a time when Putin is declaring a new arms race with the U.S., Russian scientists want to stop global warming in their own way... What happens if the rest of the world doesn't want them to do it because we aren't convinced they are right? How do we stop them?

I've thought of this in regards to China blowing up satalites , creating weather and the recent assult on Estonia by Russian born internet virus's and spam too... .

This at a time when strange metal things fall from the sky in New Jersey and orange snow is falling in Russia.

As far as I know there isn't a connection to the orange snow and China's experiements, or the falling metal and blown up satallites - but as far as I know, there aren't publicized investigations either.

The world's diplomacy and negotiation abilities are at a miserable failure with most countries unable to even get along within themselves anymore, even science is at war with itself. But our reliance on science and technology is at it's highest and the power that humans wield is ever growing to influence not just the weather, but the genetic make up of the other living beings that share this planet.

Right now warfare and intimidation are moving away from the military soldier against soldier fighting to terrorists and economic strangling - but where as in the past where scientists would help the military, there may be little need for a 'middle man' anymore. Governments can just use scientists, technicians and your every day nerd for creative strategies that will threaten the economies and communication ability of their enemies... and maybe the food they grow, the weather that falls on them and who knows what else...

Imagine if some country blows up a bigger satalite that causes so much debris in the atmosphere that it takes out or severely limits our ability to communicate or makes just standing in your own house a danger from falling space debris? How do you fight that??

And the arguments we are getting into don't even have to be major, I mean, Russia brought Estonia to it's knees over the insult of a STATUE being moved... Talk about petty reasons to attack your neighbor.

And it wouldn't even be necessary for a government to issue an 'attack', the people themselves could do such a thing if they were organized enough.

The time to get serious about trash and recycling is

2007-05-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

There is so much waste and inefficiency in the way the modern world deals with it's garbage and most of it does not have to do with what happens to the garbage once it's made, most of it is the creation of garbage in the first place. Everything we eat comes in disposable packaging, some can be recycled, but at cost and not everyone is required to recycle.

The biggest problem is that selling goods is what drives the market and pretty packaging is much more important than anything else. There are some concerns over safety and weight and cost, but very little thought actually goes into creating packaging that can be easily reused or is minimal for disposal reasons.

If people had to pay per pound to have their trash taken away instead of a flat fee for everything to be taken, you can bet their decisions on what to buy would be based more on the weight and recyclability of their trash and THAT would motivate the products to be more effecient and possibly even market light weight or totally recyclible. and everyone would invest in a heavy duty garbage disposable that would eliminate most food garbage altogether.

There is no reason at all why a big corporation that puts out multiple products of similar size and weight couldn't create packaging that could be completely not just recycled, but reused! A grocery that offered all their products in neatly stackable resealable boxes that they would offer to come pick up (AND WASH) could charge a fee and make considerably more money per product, while the consumer would be able to escape the trash fees.

As it is, the below story is going to continue to happen until something is thought of to do

Naples's trash is a challenge politicians are flunking
By Ian Fisher
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy: Business at Pizzeria
Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The
reasons include egg shells, fermenting teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks
human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, scuzzy wine bottles - all in an
unbroken heap, at places two meters high, stretching the length of a football
field along the curb to the pizzeria's door.
It smells bad.
"If you see all this trash, you don't have much desire to eat," said the pizzeria owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days,
is very angry at the city's leaders.
For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into real crisis, as much political as sanitary. The trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump the region's refuse officially filled up. The last legal dump closed on Saturday.
And as the stench rose, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights - one of many protests for various causes that also included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. Even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.
"The people are right," said Guido Lauria, who is in charge of
sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood,
where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage Wednesday morning. "You smell
this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they
complain."
The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its
loveliness and squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, ongoing
inequity in poor southern Italy and the local mafia, the camorra.
But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point in Italy.
As trash dumps filled up over the years, new places or ways to get rid
of garbage were not found, largely because of local protests or protection by
one politician or another. Years of postponing the problem finally caught up
with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperatures rose, creating as much
stink as unsightliness).
"This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure," said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of the Italian Parliament for the center-left Daisy party.
Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling "to make strong
choices" to build new dumps or incinerators in any particular place.
And so, as the world's media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets last week, the nation's president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual "extreme energetic
appeal" to all levels of government, and politicians of the left, right and
center, finally to solve the region's crisis. At stake was not just public
order, he said, but "the image of the country."
The president's office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case, Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town - led by one devout and praying woman dubbed "la Passionaria of Parapoti" - to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.
That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the
surrounding communities to finally begin digging themselves out - and hopefully
lower tempers here, too.
Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to the tourist trade upon which it depends heavily, seemed largely clean, and in the last few days, the city's sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.
But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains,
compounding longstanding problems, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of
southern Italy, where dingy high-rises already are plagued by drugs and the
mafia.
On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods,
drug dealers sat across the street from a dumpster spilling over with
construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot. "It's never been like this
- I can't tell you why," said Sabato D'aria, 37, owner of a grocery also across
from the dumpster. Politicians, he said, only "talk, talk, talk. But in the
end you see very little. Unfortunately here in the south we are always more
penalized. Italy is divided."
There is also the problem of the camorra, which, experts say, profits extraordinarily from the region's endless crisis over its trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war. Experts say the camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis - and which experts say are far more harmful than legal ones to the health of humans and the environment.
In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been
proposed by an emergency commission: In short, greater recycling and the opening
of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring
provinces. But as has happened in several towns over the last two weeks, locals
that may be affected protest loudly.
"The reaction is very strong," said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government's "trash czar."
She called it "an exaggerated Nimby syndrome," in which she said the
"not-in-my-backyard" protesters get disproportionately large media coverage.
And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, a town just north of Naples - and people there have been complaining, too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three gray smokestacks for the region's only incinerator, set to start up in several months, rise from the town's edge.
But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attract clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor's yard.
"Acerra shouldn't die," said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. "It should fight." So it remains to be seen whether Naples is ready to
overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can agree on where new dumps and
incinerators should be located. Shipping it abroad does not seem an option:
Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy's
trash. If difficult decisions are not made - and quickly - nearly everyone
fears trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and
questions on how this can still happen in Europe.
Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Naples and Rome.

Genetic Engineering of our plants

2007-05-28T03:26:00.000-07:00

I'm going to ignore the climate change aspect of this article and focus on the fascinating science behind plant breeding, which narrows down the genetic diversity in order to yield more crops that taste better and are resistant to pests and drought, and their wild plant cousins who live out in the world and contain much more variety in their genes.

Like 'well-bred' dogs and the wild wolf, humans get the traits they want from the species by controlling who gets to mate with whom - which is different than genetically designing a dog in a petri dish. However, imagine taking a dog breed such as a poodle and deciding you want spots like a dalmation - a breeder would need multiple generations to make that possible. But once the genes were mapped out, a scientist in a lab could do it in much less time.

However, in both cases, you still need something to work with - be it a wild species of plant or the breeds of dogs that have the genetic material you want. A place that built it's work on the breeding of specialized chimera would need wild animals and breeds of chimera from which to draw from when creating it's ever more specialized population of creatures.

Vital Genetic Resources For Resisting Drought, Pests Jeopardised By Climate
Wild relatives of plants such as the potato and the peanut
are at risk of extinction, threatening a valuable source of genes that are
necessary to boost the ability of cultivated crops to resist pests and tolerate
drought, according to a new study released by scientists of the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The culprit is climate
change, the researchers said. According to the study, in the next 50 years as
many as 61 percent of the 51 wild peanut species analyzed and 12 percent of the
108 wild potato species analyzed could become extinct as the result of climate
change. Most of those that remained would be confined to much smaller areas,
further eroding their capacity to survive. The study also examined wild
relatives of cowpea, a nutritious legume farmed widely in Africa. It found that
only two of 48 species might disappear. However, the authors predict that most
wild cowpeas will decline in numbers because climatic changes will push them out
of many areas they currently inhabit. "Our results would indicate that the
survival of many species of crop wild relatives, not just wild potato, peanuts
and cowpea, are likely to be seriously threatened even with the most
conservative estimates regarding the magnitude of climate change," said the
study's lead author, Andy Jarvis, who is an agricultural geographer working at
two CGIAR-supported centers - the Colombia-based International Center for
Tropical Agriculture and Bioversity International, with headquarters in Rome.
"There is an urgent need to collect and store the seeds of wild relatives in
crop diversity collections before they disappear. At the moment, existing
collections are conserving only a fraction of the diversity of wild species that
are out there." Extinction of crop wild relatives threatens food production
because they contain genes for traits such as pest resistance and drought
tolerance, which plant breeders use to improve the performance of cultivated
varieties. The reliance on wild relatives to improve their cultivated cousins on
the farm is expected to intensify as climate change makes it too hot, too cold,
too wet or too dry for many existing crop varieties to continue producing at
their current levels. The results of the study were announced on International
Biodiversity Day, organized by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Jarvis and his colleagues looked specifically at the effects of climate change
on the three crops in Africa and South America. The scientists focused on the
two continents because this allowed them to consider how known populations of
wild plants would fare in a wide variety of growing conditions. They found the
impact of climate change is likely to be more pronounced in some species than in
others but that, in general, all three groups of species would suffer. Though
not apparent to the average consumer, the wild relatives of crops play an
important role in food production. All food crops originated from wild plants.
But when they were domesticated, their genetic variation was narrowed
significantly as farmers carefully selected plants with traits such as those
related to taste and appearance as well as to yield. When trouble arises on the
farm -attacks by pests or disease or, more recently, stressful growing
conditions caused by climate change - breeders tend to dip back into the gene
pool of the robust wild relatives in search of traits that will allow the
domesticated variety to overcome the threat. In recent years, genes available in
wild relatives have helped breeders develop new types of domesticated potatoes
that can fight devastating potato blight and new types of wheat more likely to
survive drought conditions. Wild relatives of the peanut have helped breeders
provide farmers with varieties that can survive a plant pest known as the root
knot nematode, and resist a disease called early leaf spot. In fact, according
to the report, more than half of new domesticated peanut varieties developed in
the last five years have incorporated traits from wild relatives. Cowpea wild
relatives are known to be a reservoir of genes that could confer resistance to
major insect pests. In the US alone, the value of the improved yield and quality
derived from wild species is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of
dollars a year. Jarvis said the vulnerability of a wild plant to climate change
can depend on its ability to adapt by, for example, extending its range as
warming in its native regions becomes too hot to handle. One reason wild peanut
plants appear to be so vulnerable to climate change is they are largely found in
flat lands and would have to migrate a long way to reach cooler climates, a
predicament exacerbated by the fact that peanuts bury their seeds underground, a
meter or less from the parent plant. That limits the speed at which seeds can
move into more favorable climates. By contrast, plants in mountainous locations
could theoretically survive by extending their range slightly up a slope, even
by only a few meters, to find cooler weather. What scientists must do, Jarvis
said, is identify which wild relatives are most likely to suffer from climate
change and give them priority for conservation. "The irony here is that plant
breeders will be relying on wild relatives more than ever as they work to
develop domesticated crops that can adapt to changing climate conditions," said
Annie Lane, the coordinator of a global project on crop wild relatives led by
Bioversity International. "Yet because of climate change, we could end up losing
a significant amount of these critical genetic resources at precisely the time
they are most needed to maintain agricultural production. Research that
identifies crop wild relatives threatened by climate change is part of a broader
CGIAR effort to anticipate and blunt the effects of global warming on
agriculture. In the local, national, and international policy arenas, CGIAR
researchers are generating innovative options to foster adaptation to climate
change. In addition, new research at CGIAR-supported centers focuses on
understanding the impacts of shifting climate patterns on natural resources,
such as water, fisheries, and forests, and on planning for improved management
of these resources to meet the needs of growing populations as the climate
changes.

What happens when the Federal Government can't enforce it's own laws the States don't like?

2007-05-27T15:00:00.000-07:00

What's to be done when a centralized government such as the U.S. Federal Government, makes laws and claims lands that the local constituants abhore, and when the local government decides it is probably in their best interests to do what their people want than to obey the centralized government? Do you charge people fines - what if they don't pay them and the state/county governments don't enforce them? Do you go in with federal troops to try to force compliance? What if the state puts up a defense, do you start a civil war? Does the federal government have enough power to stop this from happening? Does it have enough willpower to do it? Will it change the laws before it makes outlaws of it's citizens?

Posted on Sun, May. 27, 2007

Utah defies U.S. land policies
National parkland is a flash
point. Residents demand it for grazing and off-road vehicle use.
By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times
RECAPTURE CANYON, Utah - It's a small gesture of
defiance: a narrow metal bridge that allows off-road vehicles illegal access to
this archaeologically rich canyon. But the structure, built by San Juan County
on U.S. government land, is a symbol of the widespread local resistance to
federal authority across much of southern Utah's magnificent
countryside.
Historically, people in the rural West have challenged federal
jurisdiction, claiming ownership over rights-of-way, livestock management and
water use. But nowhere is the modern-day defiance more determined, better
organized or well-funded than in Utah, where millions of taxpayer dollars are
spent fighting federal authority, and where the state is helping to pay the tab,
much of it, critics say, without oversight.
For a decade, the legislature and
two state agencies have funneled money to southern Utah counties for legal
challenges to federal jurisdiction. Most recently, a state representative
persuaded the legislature to provide $100,000 to help fund a lawsuit by ranchers
and two counties seeking to expand cattle grazing in the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Grand Staircase is one of a dozen
parks and monuments that draw tens of millions of visitors to the region every
year to take in the spectacular high desert and red-rock canyons that have awed
travelers since John Wesley Powell voyaged down the Green and Colorado Rivers in
1869.
"This is a beautiful and unique land," said Bill Smart, retired editor
of Salt Lake City's Deseret News. "It's distressing that we can't all be more
appreciative of the values that other people see here. To me it's very
disappointing that our own people can't see what we have."
A deep resentment
In southern Utah, where the federal government controls as much as 90 percent of
the land in some counties, many residents feel they are permanent tenants on
land their ancestors pioneered. The resentment hardens whenever Washington
restricts ranching, mining, energy development or motorized recreation.
"Who
gets to control the land is the great American story," said Karl Jacoby,
associate professor of history at Brown University. "In part it is about
economics, but a lot of it is about identity and who we are as a
people."
Officials of one county have written a bill, pending in Congress,
that would order the sale of federal land, with the proceeds given to the
county. Other Utah counties have said they would follow suit. And officials from
the two counties surrounding Grand Staircase have lobbied in Washington to
dramatically reduce the two-million-acre national monument.
Elected officials
have flouted federal authority by bulldozing roads in the Grand Staircase
monument and Capitol Reef National Park, and by tearing down signs banning
off-road vehicles in Canyonlands National Park. A handful of counties have
developed transportation plans that declare federally closed roads
open.
Selma Sierra, Utah director of the federal Bureau of Land Management,
insisted that the agency's relationship with counties was good.
"The BLM
manages a substantial amount of land in this state," Sierra said. "Yes, those
lands belong to everyone in the country, but the decisions we make affect those
[local] individuals more so than anywhere else."
A threat to the land But
federal officials say increases in motorized recreation and scarring of the
landscape from energy exploration threaten historic and cultural treasures and
damage wildlife habitat.
A BLM archeological assessment of third-century
Anasazi ruins and cliff dwellings in Recapture Canyon found evidence of looting
and off-road-vehicle damage. According to the assessment, the new, county-built
bridge "can be expected to hasten and increase indirect impacts to cultural
resources here."
"It's quite common in Utah to hear people say, 'The federal
government should give the land back to the state.' But the state never owned
it," said Daniel McCool, director of the American West Center at the University
of Utah.
McCool said rebellious county commissioners no longer represented
the demographic of the American West.
"There is a new rural resident," he
said. "They didn't move here to ranch and raise cattle. They moved here for the
amenities value of the public lands. That's what's driving the economy now.
Today, the single largest nongovernmental components of Utah's economy are
tourism and recreation."
According to an economic analysis commissioned by
the National Parks Conservation Association, national parks generate at least $4
for state and local economies for every dollar in the parks' budgets. Zion
National Park, in southwest Utah, had 2.5 million visitors last year and
provided nearly $100 million in annual recreational benefits to the surrounding
county, according to the study.
But Lt. Gov. Gary R. Herbert said in an
interview that Utah had endured an "erosion of rights."
"We're not going to
sit back anymore. We're going to be proactive. We are going to protect our
rights," he said.
State Rep. Mike Noel, a Republican from the southern
community of Kanab, said it got down to "sovereignty and autonomy."
"It's
Western independence," Noel said. "We own the water, we have the right to graze,
the minerals are still available, and the roads belong to us. By dang, we are
not going to give them up."

Chimera Ebryos to experiment on, but not implant

2007-05-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

This is what I expected to happen, that experimentation will take place but under strict controls... but in the novel, the people who knew how to do this will get tired of being told what they can and can't do, and move to a place where they won't have a government who cares or gets involved... or maybe the government will WANT it to happen for their own reasons.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,2081755,00.html

Hybrid embryos get go-aheadDavid BattyThursday May 17, 2007

The government has overturned its proposed ban on the creation of
human-animal embryos and now wants to allow them to be used to develop new
treatments for incurable diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
The proposal, in a new draft fertility bill published today, would allow scientists to create three different types of hybrid embryos.
Scientists would be allowed to grow the embryos in a lab for no more than two weeks, and it would be illegal to implant them in a human.

The first kind of hybrid allowed under the bill, known
as a chimeric embryo, is made by injecting cells from an animal into a human
embryo. The second, known as a human transgenic embryo, involves injecting
animal DNA into a human embryo.

The third, known as a cytoplasmic hybrid, is created by transferring the
nuclei of human cells, such as skin cells, into animal eggs from which almost
all the genetic material has been removed.

This is this type of human-animal embryo that is being developed in British
universities. Scientists say that developing these embryos will provide a
plentiful source of stem cells - immature cells that can develop into many
different types of tissue - for use in medical research.

The move is a U-turn on proposals to outlaw all types of human-animal
embryos set out by ministers in a white paper published last December. But the
new proposal would not allow the creation of "true hybrid" embryos, which would
involve fertilising a human egg with animal sperm or vice versa.

The government was criticised by the Commons science and technology
committee for proposing an outright ban after objections were raised by pro-life
groups opposed to any research on embryos.

The draft bill, which also covers fertility treatment, will overhaul the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990.

British scientists have already applied to the Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Authority, which regulates embryo research, for a licence to use
human-animal embryos for medical research.

Professor John Burn, head of the human genetics institute at Newcastle
University, welcomed the government's U-turn.

"I'm delighted that common sense has prevailed. I fully understand the
knee-jerk reaction that creating human-animal embryos is worrying," he
said.

"But what we're talking about here are cells on a dish not a foetus. We're
talking about something that looks like sago under the microscope. And it's
illegal to ever turn these cells into a living being."

A team led by Lyle Armstrong at Newcastle University's stem cell institute
has applied to the HFEA to use cow eggs to develop stem cells for the treatment
of diabetes and spinal paralysis.
Another team led by Professor Stephen
Minger, director of the stem cell biology laboratory at King's College London,
wants to use human-bovine embryos to study degenerative neurological diseases
such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Yay Burger King!

2007-03-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

One of the things that happens in the novel is that many corporations realize that public concern for animals and the environment is such a motivational facter in purchase decisions that great marketing can be done and customer loyalty created by being sensitive to these things.

Celebrities are much more likely to allign themselves with such brands that go out of their way to be 'cruelty free' and 'green' and some even donate their name free of charge (Ares and Aphrodite do this for exchange of product since they are 'Naturals')

I really think it's an oppertunity that a lot of businesses aren't cashing in on right now, but today I saw an article that made me smile. Burger King has decided to start caring where their meat comes from.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/business/28burger.html?ei=5065&en=56ef6e7e7911d0db&ex=1175745600&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

Burger King Shifts Policy on Animals
By ANDREW MARTIN
In what animal welfare advocates are describing as a “historic advance,” Burger King, the world’s second-largest hamburger chain, said yesterday that it would begin buying eggs and pork from suppliers that did not confine their animals in cages and crates.
The company said that it would also favor suppliers of chickens that use gas, or “controlled-atmospheric stunning,” rather than electric shocks to knock birds unconscious before slaughter. It is considered a more humane method, though only a handful of slaughterhouses use it.
The goal for the next few months, Burger King said is for 2 percent of its eggs to be “cage free,” and for 10 percent of its pork to come from farms that allow sows to move around inside pens, rather than being confined to crates. The company said those percentages would rise as more farmers shift to these methods and more competitively priced supplies become available.
The cage-free eggs and crate-free pork will cost more, although it is not clear how much because Burger King is still negotiating prices, Steven Grover, vice president for food safety, quality assurance and regulatory compliance, said. Prices of food at the chain’s restaurants will not be increased as a result.

While Burger King’s initial goals may be modest, food marketing experts and animal welfare advocates said yesterday that the shift would put pressure on other restaurant and food companies to adopt similar practices.

“I think the whole area of social responsibility, social consciousness, is becoming much more important to the consumer,” said Bob Goldin, executive vice president of Technomic, a food industry research and consulting firm. “I think that the industry is going to see that it’s an increasing imperative to get on that bandwagon.”

Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said Burger King’s initiatives put it ahead of its competitors in terms of animal welfare.
“That’s an important trigger for reform throughout the entire industry,” Mr. Pacelle said.
Burger King’s announcement is the latest success for animal welfare advocates, who were once dismissed as fringe groups, but are increasingly gaining mainstream victories.
Last week, the celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck announced that the meat and eggs he used would come from animals raised under strict animal welfare codes.
And in January, the world’s largest pork processor, Smithfield Foods, said it would phase out confinement of pigs in metal crates over the next decade.
Some city and state governments have banned restaurants from serving foie gras and have prohibited farmers from confining veal calves and pigs in crates.
Temple Grandin, an animal science professor at Colorado State University, said Smithfield’s decision to abandon crates for pregnant sows had roiled the pork industry. That decision was brought about in part by questions from big customers like McDonald’s, the world’s largest hamburger chain, about its confinement practices.

“When the big boys move, it makes the entire industry move,” said Ms. Grandin, who serves on the animal welfare task forces for several food companies, including McDonald’s and Burger King.

Burger King’s decision is somewhat at odds with the rebellious, politically incorrect image it has cultivated in recent years.

Its commercials deride “chick food” and encourage a more-is-more approach to eating with its turbo-strength coffee, its enormous omelet sandwich, and a triple Whopper with cheese.
Burger King executives said the move was driven by their desire to stay ahead of consumer trends and to encourage farmers to move into more humane egg and meat production.
“We want to be doing things long before they become a concern for consumers,” Mr. Grover said. “Like a hockey player, we want to be there before the puck gets there.”
He said the company would not use the animal welfare initiatives in its marketing. “I don’t think it’s something that goes to our core business,” Mr. Grover said.

Beef cows were not included in the new animal welfare guidelines because, unlike most laying hens and pigs, they continue to be raised outdoors. Burger King already has animal welfare standards for cow slaughter, he said.
The changes were made after discussions with the Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA.

PETA, in particular, has started a series of high-profile campaigns to pressure fast-food companies to change their animal welfare practices, including a “Murder King” campaign that ended in 2001 when Burger King agreed to improve its animal welfare standards to include, among other things, periodic animal welfare audits.

Since that time, PETA officials said they had met periodically with Burger King officials to encourage them to adopt tougher standards. About a year ago, the Humane Society began its own efforts to encourage Burger King to improve its farm animal standards.
Mr. Grover said his company listened to suggestions from both groups, but ultimately relied on the advice of its animal welfare advisory board, which was created about six years ago and includes academics, an animal welfare advocate, an executive of Tyson Foods and Burger King officials.

“Where we think we can support what our animal advisers think is right, we do it,” Mr. Grover said.

The changes apply to Burger King suppliers in America and Canada, where the chain purchases more than 40 million pounds of eggs a year and 35 million pounds of pork, he said.
A reason that such a small percentage of purchases will meet the new guidelines is a lack of supply, Mr. Grover said.

Burger King plans to more than double its cage-free purchases by the end of this year, to 5 percent of the total, and will also double its purchases of pork from producers who do not use crates, to 20 percent.

Most laying hens in the United States are raised in “battery cages,” which are usually stacked on top of each other three to four cages high. Sows, during their pregnancies, are often kept in gestation crates, which are 24 inches across and 7 feet long.
Matt Prescott, PETA’s manager for factory farm campaigns, argued that both confinement systems were filthy and cruel because the animals could barely move and were prone to injury and psychological stress.

Under Burger King’s initiative, laying hens would be raised in buildings where they would be able to wander around. Similarly, sows would be raised indoors, most likely in pens where they would be able to move freely.

“This is not free range, but simply having some room to move around inside a controlled environment,” Mr. Grover said.

While converting barns for crate-free sows is relatively simple, Ms. Grandin said it was much more difficult and expensive to raise cage-free hens because not nearly as many birds fit in one building.

Burger King officials say they hope that by promoting controlled-atmosphere stunning, more slaughterhouses will adopt the technology. Currently, there are only a few in the United States using the technique, and most of them process turkeys.

Writing is going well... back up to 12 chapters!

2007-03-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

Everyone keeps asking me how many chapters do I have left to write, and I keep telling them, "I have no clue!" But what I do know is that the story arch is about 1/3 of the way through and the plot keeps changing - in nuance only.

I'm finding keeping continuity and consistancy to be the most challenging at this point. My characters are very nailed down in my mind, but to get the plot to go where I want to go AND keep them in character, I keep having to alter things a bit.

All in all, I'm having a BLAST because I enjoy the characters and even when I have to write a scene 2-4x I'm enjoying every minute of it because I love spending time with them... and it's always worth while to get it 'right' and not just settle with something.

On the science side of things - just saw this (sorry, still haven't figured out the html on this blog):

By the time my novel takes place, the Delphi Center no longer uses chimera as doners for moral reasons associated with the rights of animals... they have the advantage in their time of an alternate solution of merely growing the organ in a lab instead of needing to kill something. That is how they make 'meat' as well. But not everyone uses or CAN use the Delphi Center's technology, and some of this is still going on.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=444436&in_page_id=1770&in_page_id=1770&expand=true#StartComments

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% humanBy CLAUDIA JOSEPH Last updated at 21:26pm on 24th March 2007

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.
Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."

At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an organ becomes available.

Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras.

But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.

Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV."

Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all."

You can purchase the right to let your cat fart... guilt free...

2007-02-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

You think I'm joking? With global warming along comes many solutions to try to make a difference and help people who feel helpless get a sense that they are making a difference...

High poluting corporations that want to reduce emmissions need money to do it and middle men companies are coming along to connect these two groups of people.

For the most part it's not manditory - yet. I thought of the idea that eventually you will have to buy travel points and trash points and garbage points in order to have the right to buy tickets or get your garbage picked up and recycled....

But reality is always stranger than fiction... and yes, there is a company who is selling points for just what I titled this entry.

**********************

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=columnist_mukherjee&sid=a6JuMPizIG6o

China, India Smile as West Overpays for Climate: Andy Mukherjee
By Andy Mukherjee
Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Governments in rich nations are spending billions of dollars to buy a clearer conscience over climate change. Are they getting their money's worth?
Enlightened individuals, those who stay awake at nights wondering what they can do to prevent the polar caps from melting, at least have a growing menu of choices.
Sydney-based Easy Being Green says it will mitigate your cat's flatulent contribution to global warming for A$8 ($6). The same company could also make your granny ``carbon-neutral'' at A$10 a year, according to a report in the Australian newspaper last weekend. ......

****************

Scarification, body piercing, implants etc...

2007-02-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

All of this is something people have been doing for a long time, and the trends and beauty of body modification change and go in and out of stlye.

http://www.vidmax.com/index.php/videos/view/167

With new technology, such as genetic modification and transplants, along with the popularity of animal totems and cosmetic surgery and intense fandom or obsessions with fantasy, I believe the trends of the future will take on a whole new possibility of body modification...

And in my novel, I explore all of these trends and the effect it has on culture and society.

My momentum is still good and I'm happily writing for at least 2 hours a day (6 days a week) and often times for +4 hours a day - sometimes as much as 6. It's very cool... I'm loving it. :)

Regrowing limbs and extra limbs.

2007-02-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

One of the things that the Delphi does besides create chimera/morphs is to heal people through transplants and genetic therapy.

Here's something I hadn't thought about! But will now probably include. Especially the idea that people might want not to just grow an arm that's been injured, but to actually grow a second set of arms... for multi-tasking and the freak aspect of getting more views on their vlogs.

But in any case, this is pretty cool.... my husband is missing part of his left pinky due to an accident, and it made me wonder if it would ever be possible for him to regrow that... and if he would want to do it. He says yes.

*****************

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/02/18/D8NCIHHG0.html

Science Finding Ways to Regrow FingersFeb 18 11:33 PM US/Eastern

By MALCOLM RITTERAP Science Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers _ and someday, even limbs _ with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel.
There's the guy who sliced off a fingertip but grew it back, after he treated the wound with an extract of pig bladder. And the scientists who grow extra arms on salamanders. And the laboratory mice with the eerie ability to heal themselves.

This summer, scientists are planning to see whether the powdered pig extract can help injured soldiers regrow parts of their fingers. And a large federally funded project is trying to unlock the secrets of how some animals regrow body parts so well, with hopes of applying the the lessons to humans.
The implications for regrowing fingers go beyond the cosmetic. People who are missing all or most of their fingers, as from an explosion or a fire, often can't pick things up, brush their teeth or button a button. If they could grow even a small stub, it could make a huge difference in their lives.
And the lessons learned from studying regrowth of fingers and limbs could aid the larger field of regenerative medicine, perhaps someday helping people replace damaged parts of their hearts and spinal cords, and heal wounds and burns with new skin instead of scar.
But that's in the future. For now, consider the situation of Lee Spievack, a hobby-store salesman in Cincinnati, as he regarded his severed right middle finger one evening in August 2005.
He had been helping a customer with an engine on a model airplane behind the shop. He knew the motor was risky because it required somebody to turn the prop backwards to make it run the right way.
"I pointed to it," Spievack recalled the other day, "and said, 'You need to get rid of this engine, it's too dangerous.' And I put my finger through the prop."
He'd misjudged the distance to the spinning plastic prop. It sliced off his fingertip, leaving just a bit of the nail bed. The missing piece, three-eighths of an inch long, was never found.
An emergency room doctor wrapped up the rest of his finger and sent him to a hand surgeon, who recommended a skin graft to cover what was left of his finger. What was gone, it appeared, was gone forever.
If Spievack, now 68, had been a toddler, things might have been different. Up to about age 2, people can consistently regrow fingertips, says Dr. Stephen Badylak, a regeneration expert at the University of Pittsburgh. But that's rare in adults, he said.
Spievack, however, did have a major advantage _ a brother, Alan, a former Harvard surgeon who'd founded a company called ACell Inc., that makes an extract of pig bladder for promoting healing and tissue regeneration.
It helps horses regrow ligaments, for example, and the federal government has given clearance to market it for use in people. Similar formulations have been used in many people to do things like treat ulcers and other wounds and help make cartilage.
The summer before Lee Spievack's accident, Dr. Alan Spievack had used it on a neighbor who'd cut his fingertip off on a tablesaw. The man's fingertip grew back over four to six weeks, Alan Spievack said.
Lee Spievack took his brother's advice to forget about a skin graft and try the pig powder.
Soon a shipment of the stuff arrived and Lee Spievack started applying it every two days. Within four weeks his finger had regained its original length, he says, and in four months "it looked like my normal finger."
Spievack said it's a little hard, as if calloused, and there's a slight scar on the end. The nail continues to grow at twice the speed of his other nails.
"All my fingers in this cold weather have cracked except that one," he said.
All in all, he said, "I'm quite impressed."
None of this proves the powder was responsible. But those outcomes have helped inspire an effort to try the powder this summer at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, on soldiers who have far more disabling finger loss because of burns.
Fingers are particularly vulnerable to burns because they are small and their skin is thin, says David Baer, a wound specialist at the base who's working on the federally funded project. The five to 10 patients in the project will be chosen because they have major losses in all their fingers and thumbs, preventing them from performing the pinching motion they need to hold a toothbrush, for example.
The soldiers will have the end of a finger stub re-opened surgically, with the powder applied three times a week.
Nobody is talking about regrowing an entire finger. The hope is to grow enough of a finger, maybe even less than an inch, to do pinching.
And it is just a hope.
"This is a real shot in the dark," says Badylak, who's participating in the project. "There's literally nothing else these individuals have to try. They have nothing to lose."
But from a scientific standpoint, he said, "this isn't ready for prime time."
For one thing, it's not completely clear what happened inside Lee Spievack's finger.
The broad outline is pretty straightforward. The powder is mostly collagen and a variety of substances, without any pig cells, said Badylak, who's a scientific adviser to ACell. It forms microscopic scaffolding for incoming human cells to occupy, and it emits chemical signals to encourage those cells to regenerate tissue, he said.
Those signals don't specifically say "make a finger," but cells pick up that message from their surroundings, he said.
"We're not smart enough to figure out how to regrow a finger," Badylak said. "Maybe what we can do is bring all the pieces of the puzzle to the right place and then let Mother Nature take its course."
But "we are very uninformed about how all of this works," Badylak said. "There's a lot more that we don't know than we do know."
Some animals, of course, can regenerate tissue without help from any powder. Badylak and other scientists are involved in a separate, Pentagon-funded project to uncover and harness their secrets. This work might someday lead to regenerating entire limbs.
One animal they're studying is the salamander, a star of the regeneration field. Chop off a salamander's arm, and it will grow back in a matter of weeks.
Why? The short answer is that rather than making a scar to heal quickly, as people do, the salamander forms a mound of cells called a blastema. This is a regeneration factory: If you cut off a salamander hand and transplant the resulting blastema to the creature's back, it will grow out a hand there.
David Gardiner at the University of California, Irvine, is studying the secrets of the salamander by growing extra arms on the creatures. That allows for more controlled conditions than amputating arms and trying to follow what happens, he said.
So how do you make a salamander grow an extra arm? Make a shallow wound on the upper arm. Re-route a nerve to the site so it will pump out critical chemical signals that promote the creation of blastema cells. And insert a tiny piece of skin from the other side of limb you just wounded, to help provide a blueprint for what needs to be done.
The recipe sounds like "you put it in a cauldron under a full moon," Gardiner observed.
The creatures are so lethargic it's hard to tell if they can use their extra arms, he noted. But the research shows that beyond establishing a blueprint for a new arm, this mix of cells sends out a chemical S.O.S. to attract other kinds of cells from the salamander's body to help construct a new appendage.
Just how many chemical signals are involved, and what they are, remain to be discovered.
Then there's the specially bred mouse strain that befuddled Ellen Heber-Katz a decade ago, and has since become a focus of her research.
Heber-Katz, of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, was using the mouse strain known as MRL in a study of autoimmune diseases. Her team punched tiny holes in the animals' ears as markers. About three weeks later, Heber-Katz noticed a troubling thing.
"There were no ear holes," she recalled the other day. "We ear-punched again, and they closed up and disappeared.... We were just so shocked."
Like salamanders, the mice were growing blastemas instead of scars. They also heal damage to their hearts.
But for regrowing digits, even this mouse falls short. If a toe is cut off at some point other than the tip, the remnant produces a cell mass that looks like a small blastema, but it doesn't grow the missing part back. (An ordinary mouse just develops a scar.)
At least, the MRL mouse "looks like it's trying," Heber-Katz said.
In studying the mice and salamanders, scientists will pursue several questions. What genes rev up to produce regrowth? What biochemical signals are involved? What is the role of specific cells? Can this knowledge be used to regrow a digit on a mouse?
Scientists say it's not clear when this research might help people.
As for Spievack, the model-airplane enthusiast, he's had enough personal experience in this area.
"I don't plan on cutting anything more off to find out if I can grow that back," he said.

My predictions coming true already...

2007-02-12T06:46:00.000-08:00

There have been so many things in the news lately that lay the foundations for the future that I'm creating in my novel that I have almost given up trying to document it all here... But I'm going to list a few and give links where I can.

NowPublic - a newsource where individuals can post their own newstories as they see it, complete with video and photos. This eliminates the middle man (sort of, because they do have an editorial staff) and allows people to get opinions and hopefully facts right from the eye witnesses that have experienced and seen what's happening. (Vloggers are the way of information and entertainment so that anyone can become famous or infamous)

Youtube - a place where anyone can upload anything they want and become famous. It's been out for a while but they just announced last week or two ago that it's possible to start paying people for content. A crucial componant to my novel because two are entertainment vloggers who make money off of the number of hits they get.

Quantum Computers - comptuers that can calculate massive ammounts of variable information, with one of the applications being DNA design. (Technology that is crucial to the chimera characters and designer people in my novel)

Quebec (A nation within a nation) issues unique edicts to immigrants - this is something not just happening in Quebec, but in the town I live in and others across America. Small places taking a larger step in limiting who can and who can't live there and what kind of behavior they will tolerate. As more and more individual towns step out with this sort of mentality, under the desparation to control what they fear the federal and state governments are ignoring, it will get more difficult to stop them. (In my novel cities are broken up into communes where borders are controlled by)

Military for hire - several independant units are being hired by the U.S. and other countries to help in wars to do things they can't or don't want to do. (In my novel state run militaries and police find it difficult to recruit on the salaries they can afford - taxes are voluntary in libertarian states and there's just no money in socialist countries. So they are replaced by independant mercinaries and security forces which protect those who pay them and who must follow certain guidelines to be certified - certification means legitimacy and legitimacy means cross-country colaboration and juristiction.)

And a few more that I've forgotten...

Is the answer to farm cruelty creating animal zombies?

2007-01-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

I have been putting off posting some of the relevent articles I've come across both out of laziness and just a lack of anything that really stuck out as significant enough. But tonight I read something that just really made my stomach plummet.

In England apparently the concern for pigs and other intelligent animals who appear stressed when confined to cruel small cages has not convinced ranchers and government officials to change the way they do business. No, spending money on ending suffering by providing a decent life for the animals we eat is just not as 'profitable' as spending money on figuring out how to keep the animals from suffering by changing the animals.

Read from the UK:

Cloning opens door to 'farmyard freaks'By SEAN POULTER -

Moves to clone and genetically modify farm livestock have opened the door
to the creation of "Farmyard Freaks", experts have warned. News that the
daughter of a US clone cow has been born on a British farm has moved the issue
from science fiction to consumer reality. A former government adviser has
painted a nightmarish picture of "zombie" and fast-growing supersize
animals.

Professor Ben Mepham, of Nottingham University, said the
impact of bio-engineering, creating GM and cloned animals, is huge. Factory
farming techniques, most commonly used with pigs and chicken, often involve
keeping animals confined in cramped conditions. For pigs, who are
highly intelligent, these conditions can lead to stress and aggression.
However, GM scientists are actively investigating ways to remove the stress and aggression gene from animals, effectively turning them into complacent zombies. The professor said it might become technically possible to produce "animal vegetables" - beasts which are "highly prolific and oblivious to their physical and mental status".

However, he argued that while this could reduce the pain and stress of
factory farming, this did not mean it should be allowed to develop without
question. The professor of applied bioethics warned that many of the
GM experiments on animals have resulted in cruelty, producing mutants or animals which grow so large in the womb that they can only be surgically removed.
He said: "The question of whether humanity should take it upon ourselves to
alter animals by GM, involving in many cases mixing the genes of different
species - and sometimes those of human origin - is undoubtedly critical for many
people." The professor said that religious groups would see it as "an
attempt to usurp God's role" while others would be unhappy about "so
fundamentally altering the natural order". Prof Mepham, is a former
member of the Government's Agriculture, Environment Biotechnology
Commission.(AEBC)
In 2002, the Commission called on the government to set up a
regulatory body to police developments such as GM and clone farming. However, this was ignored by ministers, who subsequently scrapped the AEBC after it issued a number of reports challenging government policy in areas such as GM crops and food. The AEBC called for a ban on the creation of "intrinsically objectionable" creatures - such as pigs and cows modified not to feel stress in factory farming conditions. And it demanded separate farming and labelling of food from these creatures to allow consumers to make a choice about what they are eating. In 2002, the AEBC said the need to have in place a regulatory regime in place was "urgent" in order to prevent a repeat of the GM crop debacle.
In that case GM plants were already in British shops before there had been
sufficient research about the impact on human health or the environment.
Despite these clear warnings, the government's food and farming department,
DEFRA, refused to set up any kind of watchdog. The result is that meat and
milk from GM or cloned animals could be arriving on dinner plates in as
little as two years. The executive director of the Food Ethics Council, Dr
Tom MacMillan, said: "Cloning raise animal welfare concerns, both for the
clones and for their parents. "It also underlines how far removed industrial
food production is from what consumers actually want."

In my novel I'm not only dealing with this sort of engineering for food sake and how corporations (and governments) cover up and sneak it into the general population, but I also have a major move of naturalists who fight this sort of genetic modified food that creates a high demand for organic foods making it very profitable to run farms which are creature friendly.
Unfortunately I have yet to see the GOOD aspects of the predictions in my novel to show up anywhere.... just the creepy stuff.

Plugging away...

2007-01-07T21:50:00.000-08:00

It's time to really start getting disciplined. The holidays are over and the kids are back in school and I have been distracted long enough from writing that I need to just do it!

I have been doing a lot of research and purposefully not putting things on this board as I'm not sure how much I want to put out publically. Mostly philosophy and outline type of stuff that puts me into a great frame of mind because it's getting more organized. I have to rewrite an entire chapter (plan to do that tomorrow) because I had a conversation last for 25 pages! And that is just RIDICULOUS. With the new outline I can start fresh and just write what I need to have them say.

The way I write is to just let it flow. I know what my characters are like and I know what they need to share with each other. But in this case they just go on too many rabbit trails... which is natural and normal for any type of conversation that is real, but in a single chapter you can't just do that - can you? I don't know. I don't think so. So tomorrow I will rewrite it completely from a point where it went awry. I was going to try to edit it, but that was taking me so long to figure out what to cut out and still have them flow naturally from one topic to the next.

I have beend doing a few things to keep in the spirit of the book - like making videos of myself on myspace and other video spaces, both because I enjoy it and to get the feeling of what it must be like to be seen. That urge to see who is replying and what people think is pretty strong. I can understand how vloggers would get so excited to put up something more and more radical just to get attention. There was actually a 20/20 episode about the craze for fame that said people are more interested in being famous than anything.

I've also seen a few other things I'm including in my book that are actually happening already. The excessive and against their knowledge air brushing of actresses, the animation added to sports game (saw a comet like football today), people flocking to videos of deformed or abnormal looking people, I heard someone got a tail surgically attached! At this rate, I'm going to have to move my date up another 20 years and have it take place in 5 years!! *L*

Hope I can actually write it by then.

Nations within Nations... Communes, and the ISofA

2006-11-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

Whoa! I knew this was something that many in Quebec wanted, but I never expected it would happen - and yet I've predicted it will happen in my novel.

PM to recognize francophone Quebec as 'a nation'

Nov 22 4:10 PM US/Eastern

Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in Parliament he would recognize the country's francophone Quebec province as a "nation" within Canada.

In an unprecedented move to woo Quebec separatists, he said he would present a motion later in the day asking the House of Commons to "recognize that Quebecers constitute a nation within a united Canada."

Quebec has held and lost two referendums on separation from the rest of Canada, in 1980 and 1995. Federalists won the second vote by a narrow margin.

Harper's surprise move, he said, was aimed at blocking "an unusual request" by the separatist Bloc Quebecois to define Quebecois as a nation.

Quebecers typically understand the term to mean "a people," while Anglophone Canadians consider it akin to nationhood, with all the international responsibilities and benefits that come with it.

Politicians have tried to avoid debating this sensitive issue over the past decade, fearing it would lead to a constitutional crisis, or a loss of support in the next election in Quebec province, which holds 25 percent of parliamentary seats.

"For (the Bloc), 'nation' means separation," Harper said.

"Quebecers have always played a historic role in advancing Canada with solidarity, courage, and vision, and to build a confident Quebec, an independent Quebec that's proud and has solidarity within a strong and united Canada, an independent and free Canada," he said.

"Do Quebecers form a nation within a united Canada? The answer is yes. Do Quebecers form an independent nation from Canada? The answer is no, and it will always be no."

In my novel there are many such 'nations within nations' - I call them colonies and communes and they are made up of like-minded people who want to live life their own way, make their own rules and elect their own officials, but still want the protection of a larger nation that they are in. Some entire states break off and build walls and such which is why I call it the "Independant States of America" And some 'cities' are independant and run by corporations or unions...

So- yet another step closer to the world as I imagine it could be... thought I'd post about it. :)

just thought about this - home owners associations and communities make up their own laws already... that are IN ADDITION to the laws of the city/state/country. So what if the country decided to only have the very basic of laws, but let the individual states come up with their own methods of governing. I think that's sort of how the founding father's imagined it - before our Federal government took over so much power to dictate what happens... Eventually (in my novel of course) states and cities will decide they don't like the way their neighbors do things and want their own laws - and FENCES to keep out the criminals and build safe places to raise their kids or to live their lives.

All land in between being no-mans land or where people who don't want laws - the anarchists would live there.. as would the gangs... with mafia lords taking over small communes that didn't have enough security of their own hired to keep them out - OR their own security system could work like the mafia.. hmmm... lots of possibilities.

The Stranger Within...

2006-11-15T06:51:00.000-08:00

Chimera and Mosaics - I'm starting to learn more about this... You'd think I would have done enough research by now to have a grasp on what this is, but not quite. So I'm going to post up some articles and links to keep track of what I need to remember for my book:

The Stranger Within

New Scientist vol 180 issue 2421 - 15 November 2003, page 34
Human chimeras were once thought to be so rare as to be just a curiosity.
But there's a little bit of someone else in all of us, says Claire
Ainsworth, and sometimes much more...

EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year- old
woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although she conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely their father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother. Somehow she has given birth to somebody else's children.

This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot Kruskall, a
doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who we will call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results came back, Jane was hoping for good news.

Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?

It took Kruskall and her team two years to crack the riddle. In the end they discovered that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals - non-identical twin sisters - who fused in the womb and grew into a single body. Some parts of her are derived from one twin, others from the other. It seems bizarre that this can happen at all, but Jane's is not an isolated case. Around 30 similar instances of chimerism have been reported, and there are probably many more out there who will never
discover their unusual origins.

While cases like Jane's are the extreme, researchers now think that there's a little bit of chimera in all of us, and what was once seen as a biological oddity may serve a vital function. We may owe our lives to being chimeras.

At first, Jane's case had Kruskall completely puzzled. The original data came from the tests done to "tissue-type" her and her children. Such tests are based on a set of genes called the HLA complex, which encode many different immune proteins, including cell surface proteins that immune cells use to distinguish the body's own tissues from foreign material. There are hundreds of different versions, or alleles, of each HLA gene, and because of this, each person's combination of alleles is almost unique. But because the genes are clustered close together on chromosome 6, they tend to be inherited together in a block known as a haplotype. Everyone inherits two HLA haplotypes, one from each parent.

Transplant doctors know that the closer the match between two people's HLA haplotypes, the lower the risk of a transplant between them being rejected. If you need a transplant, the obvious place to look for people with a similar haplotype is your close family. Your siblings, for example, have a 1-in-4 chance of matching yours exactly, while your children will have at least 50 per cent of your HLA genes.

Confronted with Jane's bizarre test results, Kruskall's team's first line of enquiry was to take another look at Jane's HLA genes and those of her immediate family. They identified Jane's haplotypes and dubbed them 1 and 3. They tested Jane's husband too - he had types 5 and 6. And when they looked at her sons they confirmed that the original tissue-typing was correct. While all three shared a haplotype with their father, only one shared one of Jane's. The other two sons had a haplotype of unknown
origin, labelled type 2.

The obvious interpretation was that Jane was not the biological mother of two of her sons, yet they were all conceived naturally, so how could this be? One possibility was that both boys were accidentally swapped at birth, but the chance of this happening twice to the same family is very small. Add in the fact that both sons share a haplotype with their father and it becomes a near impossibility.

Stumped, Kruskall sent her data out to colleagues, asking them if they could make sense of it. Soon researchers around the world were scratching their heads in bewilderment. "I did get the most amazing set of explanations," Kruskall recalls. "No one could quite figure it out." One suggested that Jane had secretly undergone fertility treatment using donated eggs. Another speculated that Jane and her husband had got her sister to conceive children with his sperm, and
then pretended they were hers.

The breakthrough came when Kruskall's team checked the HLA haplotypes of other members of Jane's family who had been omitted from the original tests. They discovered that her brother carried the mystery haplotype 2 - suggesting that the two sons were related to Jane in some way after all. "That really provided the spur that kept us going," Kruskall says.

So where did the sons' odd haplotype come from? Since Jane's blood cells provided no match, the team decided to test DNA from some of her other tissues, including her thyroid gland, mouth and hair. What they discovered was astonishing. Some of her tissues carried haplotypes 1 and 3, while others contained 2 and 4 (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 346, p 1546). Jane's body was made up of two genetically distinct types of cells. There was only one conclusion: Jane was a mixture of two different people.

Kruskall thinks the most likely explanation for this is that Jane's mother conceived non-identical twin girls, who fused at an early stage of the pregnancy to form a single embryo. In medical parlance, Jane is a tetragametic chimera, a person whose body is made up from two genetically distinct lines of cells derived from a total of four gametes - eggs and sperm.

This instantly explains why the tissue-typing yielded such paradoxical results. For some reason, cells from only one twin have come to dominate in Jane's blood - the tissue used in tissue-typing. In Jane's other tissues, however, including her ovaries, cells of both types live amicably alongside each other, hence the apparently impossible genetics of her three sons. One came from an egg derived from the twin whose cells dominate Jane's blood, while his two brothers came from eggs derived from the other twin's cells.

Nobody knows how common tetragametic chimerism is. It often has no outward signs and those who uncover their chimeric nature do so only by accident. Nature reported a similar case to Jane's in 1979, when genetic tests suggested that a woman could not be the mother of any of her four children. There had been no hint that the woman was chimeric.

Some chimeras do have unusual physical features. For example, one girl was discovered to be a chimera because her eyes were different colours, one brown, the other hazel. Others have come to light when doctors investigated problems with their reproductive systems, and found that they had structures from both male and female reproductive organs as a result of having cells of both sexes in their bodies. But most probably go through life utterly unaware of their unusual constitution. "They are probably dramatically under-diagnosed," Kruskall says, "and also dramatically rare."

Yet this kind of chimerism may still be common enough to cast doubt on the way we carry out genetic tests of parenthood. Kruskall is currently helping out with a court case where a woman is suing her partner, claiming that he is the father of her child. In a bizarre twist that would nonplus even Jerry Springer, tissue-typing tests proved he was the father, but ruled her out as the mother. The situation could be explained by chimerism in the mother, Kruskall speculates.

But what about a case where the father was a chimera? "You could imagine that you could rule out a person who is in fact the father," she says. This is especially plausible if one cell line always comes to dominate in the blood, as happened with Jane. Animal studies of chimerism suggest that this is indeed common.

What's more, the incidence of tetragametic chimerism is set to rise, Kruskall says, because of modern fertility techniques that increase the rate of twinning. Drugs used to make a woman ovulate can cause her to release more than one egg at a time, for example, while many IVF clinics still transfer more than one embryo into the womb. And the fact that embryos are in close contact in the lab dish or when transferred to the womb may encourage them to fuse, according to a report by a team at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In 1998, they reported a case of a chimeric IVF baby who resulted from the accidental fusion of a male embryo and a female embryo (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 338, p 166). The child was outwardly male, but the left hand side of his internal reproductive system had developed as an ovary and fallopian tube.

Meanwhile, Jane's mystery is solved - and it even has a happy ending. Because her body contains double the normal number of HLA haplotypes, it means that she has a much greater chance of finding a suitable donor kidney.

But the story doesn't end there. There is growing evidence that chimerism in one form or another may not be so unusual at all. In fact, some researchers now think that most of us, if not all, are chimeras of one kind or another. Far from being pure-bred individuals composed of a single genetic cell line, our bodies are cellular mongrels, teeming with cells from our mothers, maybe even from grandparents and siblings. This may seem a little shocking at first. The thought of playing host to cells from other people may offend your sense of individuality. But you may have those outsiders to thank for keeping you healthy.

During pregnancy, the blood of the mother and fetus are kept separate, but some cells manage to slip through, meaning that you will have picked up some cells from your mother, and she some from you. In fact, some 80 to 90 per cent of women carry their children's cells or DNA in their blood during pregnancy and up to 50 per= centcarry them for decades after giving birth, a condition called microchimerism (New Scientist, 24 April 1999, p 4). If your mother then had more children, some of your cells could in principle slip back through into your younger sibling's body. And twins can end up swapping cells in the womb, especially if they share a
placenta. So a single person can be a veritable menagerie of different cell types from different generations. "Women harbour cells from both their mother and their children," says J. Lee Nelson, an immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The fact that fetal cells persist in their mother's bloodstream for decades has been known since the mid 1990s. But only recently has anyone investigated how common it is for cells to move the other way - from mothers into their children. To investigate this, Nelson and her colleague Natalie Lambert have been searching for maternal cells in the blood of adult women.

In a forthcoming paper in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism, they describe how they took blood samples from 32 healthy women and found that 22 per cent of them were carrying white blood cells from their mothers. These maternal cells were relatively rare - at most there were 50 per million blood cells - but Nelson suspects that more extensive tests of blood and other tissues such as bone marrow would reveal microchimerism in a far greater percentage of women. And the same goes for men too. "Our guess would be that it is probably universal," she says.

This discovery raises some puzzling questions. How come the invading cells don't simply get wiped out by the immune system? Do the cells divide inside their new host? And why do mother and child exchange cells at all - is it just an accident, or does it have a purpose?

In the case of fetal cells crossing to the mother, Nelson says we don't know whether it serves any specific purpose, but one important factor could be that these cells encourage the mother's immune system to tolerate her fetus. After all, pregnancy is rather like hosting a transplanted organ for nine months, and transplant researchers have known for some time that microchimerism caused by white blood cells from the transplant mixing with those of the recipient can encourage the host to accept the
transplant under certain circumstances. And researchers think the breakdown of this long-term tolerance to fetal cells may be the cause of some autoimmune diseases in women (New Scientist, 24 February 2001, p 8). "But what benefit [fetal cells] might offer long term, no one knows," Nelson says.

As for cells passing from mother to fetus, there are hints that this may play a vital role in keeping the unborn child healthy. Your mother's cells don't just hang around passively in your body, Nelson believes. They might play an active role in repairing your tissues, especially while you are still in the womb. And she has evidence that unknown types of maternal cells cross the placenta and then "transdifferentiate" or transform themselves into different kinds of cells that then become part of the baby's body.

Anne Stevens, a researcher in Nelson's team made the discovery while studying the bodies of babies who had died from an autoimmune disease called neonatal lupus syndrome, which attacks heart muscle. In the course of testing the heart cells, she found that the babies' hearts contained muscle cells that could only have come from their mothers. Nelson says she can't yet be sure exactly how they got there, but thinks it likely that blood stem cells from the mother made their way to the heart of the developing fetus and transdifferentiated into heart cells. "It really is amazing," she says. "This is really the next conceptual leap in the entire
field, I think."

The question is, what are these maternal cells doing? Are they the cause of the autoimmune disease in the children or are they trying to intervene? One possibility is that the presence of the maternal cells triggers the baby's immune system to attack the heart.

Mother and child usually tolerate each other, but if this were to break down, the fetus's immune system would identify the mother's cells as foreign and attack them, with the fetus's own heart cells getting caught in the crossfire.

But Nelson thinks there is another, more positive explanation. "The second possibility is that the maternal cells are there trying to repair the damaged tissue," she says. Her results don't yet tell her which explanation is correct, but she says: "I always go back to remembering that there could well be beneficial functions because [microchimerism] is so common in healthy people."

While microchimerism may force immunologists to rewrite their textbooks, it may also prod us into seeing ourselves in a new light. Rather than being isolated individuals, perhaps we should see ourselves more as a collective - an individual made of many other different individuals. On one level, you are you, a person with your own thoughts and feelings. But zoom in one level and you are a supercolony of individual cells, some cooperating, others competing. Zoom in to the level of your genome, and you find individual chromosomes and genes, all jostling to get through to
the next round of natural selection. It's all a question of perspective.

More news on creating human/animal chimera...

2006-11-06T20:18:00.000-08:00

I finally finished chapter 5, and sent it out to my beta readers for review... I was so inspired to start something new, that today I wrote something like 7000 words. I have never counted my words before, but I have a new program that lets me do it, and I wonder if it's going to start being important to me.

MOSTLY I care about how the story is developing in my head and how rich and concise it is, rather than long dialogues, which I tend to have to edit down because I write too much. *L* But... it was still cool to see that I had written that much in one day. And boy was it fun too!

Then I get on to read some news and find this tidbit of news. Wowsers! Cloning and chimera and all... There is a human-cow chimera in chapter 3 of my book - *heh* Won't give anything away about that though...

Plan to create human-cow embryos

By Fergus Walsh
BBC News, Medical correspondent

UK scientists have applied for permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs.

Researchers from Newcastle University and Kings College, London, have asked the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for a three-year licence.

The hybrid human-bovine embryos would be used for stem cell research and would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days.

But critics say it is unethical and potentially dangerous.

Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris - a member of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee - said: "If human benefit can be derived by perfecting therapeutic cloning techniques or from research into subsequently-derived stem cells, then it would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a 'yuck' factor."

Stem cell research is one of the most promising areas of medical science.

"You may begin to undermine the whole distinction between humans animals and humans" - Calum MacKellar

Stem cells are the body's master cells and five-day-old embryos are packed with them - each with the potential to turn into any tissue in the body.

It is this ability which scientists want to harness to treat diseases such as Parkinson's Disease, strokes and Alzheimer's Disease.

To do that, they need to have access to thousands of embryos for research.

Short supply

The problem is that human eggs for research are in short supply and to obtain them women have to undergo surgery.

That is why scientists want to use cows' eggs as a substitute.

They would insert human DNA into a cow's egg which has had its genetic material removed, and then create an embryo by the same technique that produced Dolly the Sheep.

The resulting embryo would be 99.9% human; the only bovine element would be DNA outside the nucleus of the cell.

It would, though, technically be a chimera - part-human, part-animal.

The aim would be to extract stem cells from the embryo when it is six days old, before destroying it.

"If human benefit can be derived by perfecting therapeutic cloning techniques or from research into subsequently-derived stem cells, then it would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a 'yuck' factor." -Dr Evan Harris

The quality and the viability of stem cells would then be checked to see if the technique had worked.

The scientists also plan to examine the way the cells are reprogrammed after fusion to see if there are useful processes they could replicate in the laboratory.

Lead researcher Dr Lyle Armstrong said: "If we can learn from the egg cell how to make embryonic stem cells without having to use an animal egg at all then some day we may be able to cure diseases such as Parkinson's disease, or better still some of the age-related diseases which are creating such a burden on society."

Dr Stephen Minger, from King's College London, said: "The current state of the technology is such that literally hundreds of human ooctyes (eggs) from young women will be required to generate a single human embryonic stem cell line.

"Therefore we consider it more appropriate to use non-human oocytes from livestock as a surrogate.

"We feel that the development of disease-specific human embryonic stem cell lines from individuals suffering from genetic forms of neurodegenerative disorders will stimulate both basic research and the development of new medicines to treat these horrific brain diseases."

'Undermining humanity'

Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics, National Institute for Medical Research, said: "This is a very rational step: to learn what you can using animal eggs, which are readily obtainable, before moving on to valuable human eggs when or if this becomes necessary."

But some will argue the end does not justify the means.

Calum MacKellar, from the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, said the research undermined the distinction between animals and humans.

He said: "In the history of humankind, animals and human species have been separated.

"In this kind of procedure, you are mixing at a very intimate level animal eggs and human chromosomes, and you may begin to undermine the whole distinction between humans and animals.

"If that happens, it might also undermine human dignity and human rights."
Story from BBC NEWS:

Transplanting lab grown organs...

2006-10-31T06:28:00.000-08:00

Had to make reference to this:

British scientists grow human liver in a laboratory

By FIONA MacRAE, Science Reporter Last updated at 12:32pm on 31st October 2006

Comments Reader comments (22)

Dr Nico Forraz

British scientists have grown the world's first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant.

The technique that created the 'mini-liver', currently the size of a one pence piece, will be developed to create a full-size functioning liver.

Described as a 'Eureka moment' by the Newcastle University researchers, the tissue was created from blood taken from babies' umbilical cords just a few minutes after birth.

As it stands, the mini organ can be used to test new drugs, preventing disasters such as the recent 'Elephant Man' drug trial. Using lab-grown liver tissue would also reduce the number of animal experiments.

Within five years, pieces of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose.

And then, in just 15 years' time, entire liver transplants could take place using organs grown in a lab.

The development provides fresh hope for the hundreds of Britons in dire need of a new liver each year.

There are currently 336 patients waiting for a liver transplant - the type of operation performed on George Best. However, in 2004, 72 people died waiting for a suitable donor.

The liver tissue is created from stem cells - blank cells capable of developing into different types of tissue - found in blood from the umbilical cord.

Working in collaboration with experts from the US, the Newcastle scientists succeeded in separating out the stem cells from blood removed from the umbilical cord minutes after birth.

They are then placed in a 'bioreactor' - a piece of electrical equipment developed by NASA to mimic the effects of weightlessness. Inside this, the freedom from the force of gravity allows them to multiply more quickly than usual.

Then, various hormones and chemicals are added to coax the stem cells into turning into liver tissue.

So far, tiny pieces of tissue, less than an inch in diameter have been created.

However, in time, it should be possible to create larger and larger pieces of tissue, eventually creating sections capable of being transplanted into sick patients.

The Newcastle scientists believe that within two years the tissue could be used to test new drugs.

Currently, new drugs are tested in the test tube, before being tried out first on animals and then on humans.

However, the procedure is not foolproof, as was made painfully clear by the Northwick Park drugs trial earlier this year in which six healthy young volunteers were left fighting for their lives.

Using lab-grown human tissue could iron out any difficulties before new drugs are given to humans.

Colin McGuckin is professor of regenerative medicine at Newcastle University. He said: "We take the stem cells from the umbilical cord blood and make small mini-livers.

"We then give them to pharmaceutical companies and they can use them to test new drugs on.

"It could prevent the situation that happened earlier this year when those six patients had a massive reaction to the drugs they were testing."

Using mini-livers could also cut down on the number of animal experiments.

Within five years, the artificial liver could be used to directly benefit people's health.

The researchers envisage sections of artificial liver being used to keep patients needing liver transplants alive - in much the same way as a dialysis machine is used to treat kidney failure.

This technique would take advantage of the liver's remarkable ability to quickly regenerate itself.

The patient would be hooked up to an artificial liver which would take over all the functions usually carried out by their own liver.

With several 'dialysis' sessions a day over a period of several months, the patient's own liver would be afforded enough resting time to regenerate and repair any damage.

Alternatively, vital months could be bought in search for a suitable donor for transplant.

It is hoped that within 15 years, it will be possible to create sections of liver suitable for transplant into the body of those whose livers have been damaged beyond repair.

In many cases, this would replace the need for an entire liver transplant.

However, it would then be several more years before whole livers could be created in a lab for transplant.

While other researchers have created liver cells from stem cells from embryos, the Newcastle team are the first to create sizeable sections of tissue from stem cells from the umbilical cord.

They believe their technique is better suited to growing larger sections of tissue.

Use of cord stem cells is also more ethically acceptable than the use of embryonic stem cells - a process that leads to the death of the embryo.

The Newcastle researchers foresee a time when cord blood from millions of babies born each year is banked, creating a worldwide donor register for liver dialysis and transplant.

Computerised registers could then be created to match the cord blood with tissue type or immune system of patients with liver problems.

Already used to treat leukaemia, more than 11,000 British parents have so far chosen frozen their children's cord blood in a dozen such banks around the UK.

Prof McGuckin said: "One hundred million children are born around the world every year - that is 100 million different tissue types.

"With that number of children being born every year, we should be able to find a tissue for me and you and every other person who doesn't have stem cells banked."

Co-researcher Dr Nico Forraz said: "Our dream is that every metropolitan city would have such a bank.

"If you could type the blood all, you would have to do is dial it up on your computer and fly it from Bristol to Newcastle or even Newcastle to Kuala Lumpur."

The breakthrough has been welcomed by liver experts. However, they caution much more work is needed before the research is transferred from the lab to the operating theatre.

Professor Nagy Habib, of London's Hammersmith Hospital, said: "The stem cell is going to change the way we deliver treatment. However, it won't happen tomorrow."

Alison Rogers, Chief Executive of the British Liver Trust, said: "Stem cell technology represents a huge leap forward in treating many diseases. "With liver disease in particular it has the potential for tremendous advances."

A spokesman for UK Transplant, which runs the country's organ donor register, said: "There is lots going on in research that may have benefits for transplant patients.

"But, in the here and now, the obvious way to help these people is by more people adding their names to the organ donor register and to make their wishes known to their family."

The reader comments on that page are so typical of the responses one would expect - and they forcast what I do as well - meat to eat grown in labs - saves the animals from the cruel life and death of being grown to be killed... grown to be experimented on... it and saves the expense of treating animals well and speeds up trials...

My novel expands on all of these things, creating a world where this is everyday, and the debates go on... and the question of who/what do we have a right to hurt in order to help another is still being mulled over.

Cloaking, veils, camera's and privacy

2006-10-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

The conflict between security and privacy is one of the utmost concerns for people in our world today. It sometimes seems like the only way to stop criminals who want to murder and exploit is to spy on everyone and sort through to find them. Be it through camera's on the corners, wire taps on phones or emails we are faced with a challenge of balancing our desire for safety and to support the governmental security forces we pay taxes to protect us and our innate mistrust of their corruption and political motivations.

Earlier I posted an article about camera's going up on the corners of cities, and my belief is that this is going to happen more and more inside homes and schools etc. and I thought before of how it might be possible to protect people from the camera's through cloaking devices that make us nothing more than a blur to hide identity. The cloaking technology is not something I fully understand the science of, but here is an article about one form of cloak:

Scientists create first cloaking device

LOS ANGELES, Oct.19 (Xinhua) -- Scientists have created the first cloaking device to demonstrate the theory of hiding an object from electromagnetic radiation.

The cloak deflects microwave beams so they flow around an inside object with little distortion, making it appear almost as if nothing were there at all, a group of researchers reported in the Oct.19 online advance edition of the journal Science.

Cloaks that render objects essentially invisible to microwaves could have a variety of wireless communications or radar applications, according to the team led by scientists at the U.S. Duke University.

The first device is far from perfect in that it is barely 8-cm wide and can only reduce back scatter and forward scatter, the researchers said. But the achievement represents "one of the most elaborate metamaterial structures yet designed and produced," they wrote in the Science paper.

It also represents the most comprehensive approach to invisibility yet realized, with the potential to hide objects of any size or material property, they added.

But how would these cloaks be affordable to everyone? They wouldn't. And so something else has struck me as a possibility - the veil. Right now certain sects of Islam require/encourage women to where berka's that cover their face for religious modesty. The debate right now is as to how much veiled women can/should participate in cultures where nobody else is wearing them. Turkey, a country with a majority of Muslims doesn't even permit the complete veil, for they see it as a symbol that divides people. On the other hand, many Middle Eastern countries require it by law so that women MUST wear the veil. European countries, who like to be politically correct, yet are finding themselves threatened by extreme Islamic terrorists have not been able to decide what to do about it yet...

And then, add to it the paparazzi who follow stars and make their lives hell anytime they go out in public. People who become the fascniation of the public such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can't go anywhere... and if video blogging starts to generate income for private individuals, their invaded privacy the rate of stalkers and interest in people who can't afford the protection is going to grow. I have seen first hand at conventions the scary way that obsessed fans lose all sense of reality when they see someone famous. And the way they will track people down... In a society where the potential to track someone's every movement by camera is all around, the safety of individuals who sky rocket to fame through their fad video blog would be a major concern.

As I watch all of this happen, and think about my novel, it strikes me that during the era of which my story takes place, that instead of an expensive cloaking device, or in addition to it, the veil might be a privacy solution. It might start out that more and more women would be wearing burka's in some places, and celebrities who want to move around in these places could do so by wearing plain black veils and blend in with the population. And as more and more places allow such veils for religious reasons, to prevent it for other reasons would be discrimination, and as more people began wearing them, it could become a popular way of traveling in secret.

The other complication I would throw in there is that some people might decide they would rather be filmed all the time. With the false accusations and sensationalized media convictions such as in the Duke Lacross Team Rape Accusation the only proof some people can have to avoid jail or clear their name (often the more important of the two) is to have PROOF they were somewhere else at the time. Nobody takes anyone's word for anything anymore, and people are more apt to believe what they want to believe than ever before.

So not EVERYONE would wear a veil, but it would be an option... and cloaks would be a better options to be worn with or without a veil, because it would hide people from the video camera's, but through a code, an individual might be able to de-blur themselves. Of course then there would be the piracy of codes.

All of this is very complicated, but so is life! :)

Now, I'm off to write... I'm editing up chapter 5 today and the story has really been smushed together so that the plot is happening at a much faster rate. I would love to finish this chapter by the end of this weekend- that is my goal.

So if my beta readers are reading this - hopefully you'll find out what happens next soon!!

Bio-Engineering

2006-10-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

Here are some sci - non-fi articles that I find useful as reference material.

Ears on Mice

Gene Therapy delivery using an ultra sonic pulse

Gene therapy cures one disease, delivers another

The things that we can do now, or are working towards, are so freaky that it's really, really difficult to come up with something that is new!!

Corporate Control of Internet Content

2006-10-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

Found this interesting:
.Robert Cox: When will the right recognize the cost of conceding Web 2.0?

Here is an excerpt:

Enter Fox News pundit, author and top-rated blogger Michelle Malkin. Last week she received notice from YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing service, that her video had been deemed “offensive.” The result? Her account was terminated and her videos deleted.

YouTube refused to say why her videos were “offensive” and there was no avenue available to challenge the decision. Today, her videos are gone and her voice is suppressed on the most important video “node” on the Internet.

Some might note that Malkin can still host her videos elsewhere. Of course she can, but that would fail to understand the powerful forces of “network externalities” at play online. There is no Avis to eBay’s Hertz for good reason: Once an online network is fully catalyzed, there is no reason to join an alternative network. If you want to get the most money for your Beanie Baby collection, you are going to want access to the most potential bidders — and that means eBay.

YouTube is poised to become the eBay of video file sharing. If you want the biggest audience for your video, you want access to the most potential viewers — and that means YouTube.

Google understands this dynamic, which is why the company announced Monday that it will purchase YouTube — a company that has never made a dime — for $1.65 billion. YouTube fits very well within the Google online media portfolio. The company already owns Blogger.com, the most popular blog hosting site online, and Google News, which in two short years has become one of the top news sites in the world.

Don’t think it matters? Consider that, according to USA Today, 98 percent of the money donated to political parties by Google employees — “Google Millionaires” — went to Democrats.

But it’s not just Google’s media and financial muscle that benefits the left. Liberals run the leading blog search engine — Technorati. They run the leading blog software manufacturer — Six Apart. They invented two of the most important blogging technologies — Podcasting and RSS. The list goes on and on.

This is leading up to the kind of world I invision in my novel... Where some people, in order to get free goodies (services, benefits, basic needs etc) sign up to work for corporations in corporate cities and end up having the content censored of anything they get for 'free'... and they have to pay for independant news and programs and services... which struggle to survive.

People used to think big corporations were controlled by conservatives... and for the most part, they are, but the article above mentions a liberal corporation - which IMO shows that people who want freedom, truth and democracy will HAVE to go independant from the main political parties. I just don't know if there will be enough of us to organize effectively to prevent all media sources from being corrupted so badly by bias that there is no way to know what the facts are.

DNA Chimera for medical research...

2006-10-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

I've been sick and so have my kids, so I haven't been writing - which is very frustrating... I've got so many ideas going and I was just starting to get organized...

But tomorrow I should be back into the laptop to work on Chapter 5...

meanwhile, I saw this today and had to post it...

It's happening, just as I have predicted. Scientists are making Chimera in order to experiment on the embryo's. How long will it be before they let them grow to Fetus, or to actually be born? Not too much longer... And I need to write my book before it stops being a futuristic sci-fi novel. *L*

Link to Article below

**********

Scientists to create 'frankenbunny' in big research leap
05.10.06

Rabbit research: Experiments could day one cure Alzheimer's

Scientists are planning to create a "frankenrabbit" by fusing together human cells with a rabbit egg.

It is hoped the "chimeric" embryos, which would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, could lead to breakthroughs in stem cell research which could one day cure diseases such as Alzheimer's or spinal cord injury.

The embryos will allow scientists to perfect stem cell creation techniques without using human eggs.

"If we learn how to do this with animal eggs, we should be able to have more success with human eggs, and I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result," said Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry.

"We know this is a huge challenge after Dr Hwang in South Korea failed to get stem cells despite having 2,000 human eggs."

Teams in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle are to submit application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority this month, requesting licences to create embryos that will be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit or cow.

The HFEA is encouraging the applications after legal advice. The embryos will be allowed to grow for only 14 days, at which point they will be cells smaller than a pinhead.

Public Camera's, Big Brother, and the problem of Privacy

2006-09-25T06:13:00.000-07:00

Because of sci-fi books like "1984" that warn about what a "Big Brother" society would be like under totalitarianism with camera's everywhere watching everything, one would think we would not go that direction. But in many big cities around the country (and world) this is exactly what is happening - and privacy issues are arising by civil rights groups.

But with the problems in places like Philadelphia of finding witnesses willing to come forward and testify in violent crimes or the pervasiveness of lying in our culture, the mistrust of the judicial system and the fear of criminals getting away only to commit more crimes - many people are completely supportive of being watched if it means they will be safe.

So it's not just governments that are putting up and monitoring these camera's, it's private property owners and even individual citizens to protect their homes. However, sometimes security camera footage can be misued and even put on the internet to embarrass someone in order to entertain masses of people. Add to that the popularity of voyerism reality shows and on the beat cop television, parents watching their kids at school and in home 'nanny cams' and you're going to get an idea of what my book's version of our future is going to look like.

The problem of privacy is very important, and to protect the rights of individuals something has to be done. Laws have to be passed so that people know when they are being watched, and what is going to be done with that footage. The system I'm setting up allows for the security of catching people in the act and solves the privacy problem so that every person can stay out of camera range by choosing where they go and when.

In addition, I believe people are going to start cashing in more than ever - so that sites such as youtube will inspire individuals to use their system, promising a pay per click, while the ads so that more and more outrageous footage will be filmed or performed.

Here is an article about cameras in NYC:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/709fbdec-4bfe-11db-90d2-0000779e2340.html

Cameras watch for crime
Monday, September 25, 2006

The Surveillance Camera Players lead tours every Sunday pointing out the cameras that have popped up all over New York.

NEW YORK - You may think you’re alone as you sit there on a park bench scratching your nose or adjusting your pantyhose. But increasingly in today’s America, someone is watching you.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. In parking lots, your local mall, office lobbies, city streets.

Authorities say the cameras help catch criminals and stop terrorists. Civil libertarians say they are an invasion of privacy.

Either way, consider this: Personally, do hidden cameras make you feel safer or more on edge?

“It’s taking away people’s normal lives,” says Fruilan Cruz, a janitor at the fortress-like New York Stock Exchange, where his every move is recorded by hidden cameras as he sweeps up each day. There are even cameras in the lampposts, he says — “Everywhere.”

Indeed, New York’s financial district is awash with cameras as well as police vans and security barriers, which guard a city still on edge five years after 9/11, when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center.

It’s not just New York. Chicago has spent about $5 million on a 2,000-camera system. In Washington D.C., Homeland Security officials plan to spend $9.8 million for cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol.

Most of the cameras are set up not by police but by private companies protecting their property. And these private cameras often videotape more than simply a building’s entrance or lobby, civil libertarians warn. They may also cast their gaze outward to the public streets and sidewalks, to the park across the way, even into someone’s apartment.

“Right now there are no restrictions in place that prevent a private individual and a private entity from filming from its own property what goes on in whatever is within sight,” says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “And given the technological advances, you could film for miles.”

The privacy fears are overblown, says Robert McCrie, professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“I don’t believe the public has an expectation of privacy when they’re in public areas,” he says.

If anything, cameras will become standard in public places, he adds.

“Yes, it’s a surveillance society, but it’s got benefits for people.”

Getting back in the flow

2006-09-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a long summer and I had to stop writing for a while because of the kids. Now that they are in school 3 days a week the plan has been to dedicate that time to writing. So far it's not going so well.

In order to try to get back into the flow and to also start keeping track of articles I come across in a better way, I'm going to post more often.

Right now I don't have any articles that strike me- though I've missed many in this time and can't find them again.

One thing that has struck me today, almost to tears, is a song by Madison Park called "Opus One". It really gets at the heart of what I'm feeling when it comes to the Chimera and Mozaics at Delphi.

Lyrics

How is it, how do we hurt them?
We turn our heads from their pain.
With no regard, to how they're feeling.
They spend their lives in such disdain.
Are we not civilized I thought we cared about life
But to always to deprive a fair way of living

To spend their lives in so small a cage not much larger than their body frame
They can't lie down or stretch their legs
They never see the light of day. Ever. And I mean never.
Day in day out it's all the same.
Ever. And I mean never.
Their life is spent in pain.

How is it? How do we hurt them we turn our heads from their pain.
With no regard to how they're feeling.
They spend their lives in such disdain.
Can we not understand that they're under our hand?
That it's all up to us it's our job to help them.
To spend your life in so small a cage not much larger than your body frame
You never see the light of day, Ever. And I mean never
Day in day out it's all the same.
Ever. And I mean never.
Their life is spent in pain.

*********

It's haunting. Because I KNOW she's singing about animals that we use to eat... and it is cruel and horrible, but people just don't get it, or they don't care. Because these are just 'animals'. Now, I'm no vegitarian, I believe meat and leather and animal resources are valid for human consumption. It's the way we treat animals and the ethics and lack of empathy surrounding decisions made by corporations as well as individuals when it comes to developing their world view.

In my book, through creating creatures who are genetically human AND animal I will explore the concept of 'animal'. From racism to class struggle to the worst criminals to intelligent pets to mindless insects... where and why do we draw the lines that tell us how to treat living beings?

And what do our decisions say about us?

This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when I'm writing. And this post has been good, it got me all fired up again. :) Now to get to it!!

I took down the blogs...

2006-07-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks to anyone who read anything I've been posting, but it seems my lack of time has kept me from posting... plus I've realized I don't need this blog to get into character as I thought I might. So, I've taken them down. :)

I'll probably leave this one up though... not sure how much I'll post in it.

Julia

When no one trusts, does it matter that everyone lies?

2006-05-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

I just saw this quote on a bumper sticker website and it really hit home in relation to my novel's premise.

Like many people in this universe, the two main characters live their lives in different states of reality. They have thier public persona's, which they have worked on to define for publicity and sale - sort of like an actor/actress creating a character that they continue to be so long as their contract and popularity live on. They have their semi-personal lives which is about as private as people living on a reality show, but still a bit affected by choice. They have their personal lives, how they behave with family and close friends, and they have their inner selves.

Then we have the internet, which is the media source for everything - and nobody really knows (or cares) whose persona is real, and when they are acting for a show, or when things are really happening to them. Some people stage accidents to get more hits on their websites, some people have unneeded surgery, others make up lies about their past or get themselves thrown in jail on purpose... Many people lie about others and that is why....

The court of law does not accept personal testimony anymore. Eye witness or character witnesses are a thing of the past. There is only camera visuals and sometimes DNA evidence, though most will not believe the doctors and scientists are paid off. People don't trust anyone, but they trust their own eyes. Everyone knows that camera CGI effects (aka digital stand ins) can fool their eyes, so the only kind of camera's that are accepted in court are those that are date stamp encoded with untamperable security codes. And everyone who has the money injects their children with life long identity markers that are used to tell not just who a person is, but where they are and what their vitals happen to be. If a video is messed with, or the perp or victim don't have an identity marker -it's thrown out - so there is a very high value placed on Shadow Video camera footage.

Anyway - the idea struck me, that the more in our society we lose trust in someone's testimony because so many people are disingenous liars, the less it really matters to us that someone is lying. It's easy to accept that someone isn't telling us the truth if we already don't trust anyone.

It's really sad how much lying can hurt us. All we have is our word, and once someone loses faith, it's very difficult to get it back. Imagine an entire society where faith is gone - no trust in anyone - the expectation of deception. How hard would it be to get people to trust in someone... who would they trust? What kind of person would it take to convince an entire society full of liars to believe in an unprovable truth?

Julia

The Doctor's at Delphi...

2006-05-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

Part of my book deals with DNA enhancements and the mixing of Animal DNA with human DNA... but that's just a cool premise. What I'm really getting at, or trying to, is to explore the idea of arrogant doctors, blind faith in them, and unfounded paranoia about them. It's been done many times, (I can't tell anyone about my novel without them saying someone else has already done that - not that I would know, I don't read much sci-fi) I hope to give another interesting story that touches on many different aspects of this idea.

One of the things I do to keep myself motivated to write about the future is to read up on the latest research and news stories that illustrate what I'm getting at.

My Ares character is very religious and very anti-science... He's the one who has all these really outlandish conspiracy theories and thinks all scientists are out to do is mess with what he believes is God's perfect natural world order. At the same time he uses some science to make his game better...

Another main character is himself a trained doctor who is very humble, very good at what he does, but unfortunately a bit naive and mixed up with the wrong people and has to decide what he's going to do. He's what we hope to see in doctors (minus the naive part).

The primary antagonist believes whatever he can do through science, it is up to him to decide if he should do it or not. He is genuinely trying to do good for society, but he gets a bit mixed up along the way because of his blind faith in his own abilities.

The secondary antagonists are those that try to use science and manipulate it's findings for their own purposes, and those that refuse to believe the science that doesn't fit into their agenda.

*edit real life story I was talking about*

To anyone who read what I wrote, I decided to make this blog only about my novel and fiction... if I start getting into the real stuff going on, it's bound to get me distracted. Maybe once more of the novel is written...

Julia

Getting in the mood to write...

2006-05-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

For me writing is an emotional experience, not something I can just do because I have to (or think I should) it's something I do when I'm driven to do it and need to do it and really FEEL like doing it.

When I started writing this novel I was driven by the idea of creating my own story out of the many ideas floating in my head, and that was good for while... But 5 months into it I've discovered other ways of getting myself to that place where the ideas just flow, and I've found ways to feed that flow.

First I should say that my writing is character driven, each chapter is from the perspective of a character and each character develops a bit more in each chapter as he/she interacts with the other characters in that novel.

Music is very important - I have a whole soundtrack to my novel, different songs for different scenes and a certain sound or group goes along with a specific character. So if I want to write for a character, I put on that CD and tap into the feeling of that character.

People watching - Many of my characters are inspired by a combination of people I know or actors/characters I have connected with/admired/ in movies and T.V. shows and many are also inspired by the feeling I get from animals. Sometimes the character is not really inspired by any individual per se, but that genre of character.

Fantasy - I fantasize with dialogue in my head, imagining scenes that my characters will have and how they might respond to each other. Sometimes I do this in bed, sometimes while driving, and lately I've begun writing it down free-style in a journal. Often I've kept an idea and written it out in more detail, but many times it's just me playing with where I might want to go and sometimes for the sake of the plot, I just can't make that dialogue happen at any point in the story. But I still think it's a good exercise because it makes me experiment with the character... and explore possibilities I might not have gone to had I not played around. Plus it's fun. :)

Blog Writing - Speaking on something from the perspective of a characters has helped me to jump from "I just dropped the kids off at school, worked out, put in laundry" to "In character writing non-stop". By writing free form in the blog, I am able to shift gears and get into character and remember what it is this character is all about.

Prayer and Meditation - This is something new I'm trying. When I get stuck, distracted, need to focus, I just lay quietly and ask the Spirit to touch me and flow through me. Many times I have had some quite inspirational ideas come to me and thinking about a plot point where I was stuck, I suddenly see something I never did.

Reading the newspaper, listening to sermons, catching up on the latest technology - all of these have given me ideas to add to my novel in many ways... I think even interacting with my kids has given me ideas. In short, I'm just always open to anything that might apply to someone in my book in some way...

Freestyle writing: Recently I've started a notebook where I write dialogue only, no names or what they're doing, just the talking. It helps me to get into the characters and keep a record of what I'm thinking rather than just losing it to free thought.

Doing any of these things has helped me to get in the emotional spot I need to be in to write creatively without being held back...

Julia

What this Blogg is for

2006-05-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

I've already been posting in the bloggs of my fictional characters, and it's been a great way to get my mind into character before I write a chapter and also a way to flesh out some ideas about how the universe works.

This blogg I'm starting as a way to talk from my perspective about what's going on and to also give my friends visiting a chance to ask questions or make comments if they feel like it.

I have no plans to post regularly in this blog, but we'll see what happens.

For those who may stumble across this - and haven't been talking to me regularly, as of this date I have about 12 chapters (10 pages at 10 arial font each - I have yet to get a program that has a word count option) Some need considerable work, but the first chapter is nearly done and chapters 2-7 only need a breeze editing to make sure it's congruent after chapter one is completed.

What happened is I started the book in January, finished a couple chapters by February and quickly wrote up a few sketchy chapters after that to make sure I got my ideas down. Then realized I needed to ease into the technology and world more slowly. So I went back and added a chapter at the beginning, which turned into 3 chapters that took on a life of their own. And THEN 2 weeks ago I decided I wanted a 'prelude' which turned into a 15 page chapter. Soo... what was chapter 1 is now chapter 5.

I wrote WAAAY more than I thought I would for this first post. *heh*

Julia