The New Scientist offers new information about the relationship between car exhaust and lightning strikes, which is best illustrated during the work week when there is the most commuting.

In the south-eastern states, lightning strikes increased with pollution by as much as 25 per cent during the working week. The moist, muggy air in this region creates low-lying clouds with plenty of space to rise and generate the charge needed for an afternoon thunderstorm.

Surprisingly, the effect was not strongest within big cities with high pollution, but in the suburbs and rural areas surrounding them. “There is a misconception that if you get away from cities, you get away from the pollution. Actually, it follows you for hundreds of miles,” says Rosenfeld, who presented the research at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December.

!

A group of astronomers looking for “faint signs of heat” from long-dead stars has found, instead, a booming sound of unknown origin.

Of course, sound waves can’t travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can’t very efficiently. But radio waves can.

Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.

Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.

But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.

About six times louder, apparently.

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

Other radio galaxies also can’t account for the noise – there just aren’t enough of them.

Certainly intriguing…

Via Boing Boing.

1. Microcredit and “The Political Economy of Shame.”

2. Rick Warren to give inaugural invocation–Bad move!

3. So, what to do about the fact that Warren is doing the invocation. This is the message I sent to Emmett Beliveau, director of the inaugural committee:

Mr. Beliveau,

Signed,
Daisy Bond

Contact Beliveau at emmett@pic2009.org.

4. Bush Administration approves sweeping protections allowing health care workers to refuse care to patients. This is fucked up.

5. See Queen Emily and Jill for more about the horrifying effects of Bush’s new rule.

1. Wombs For Rent — Jill at Feministe discusses a recent article about surrogacy and the many issues around the practice.

2. An interesting article about homophobia and “handling the gay male kiss” in movies. Via Shakesville.

3. Over at Alas, Ampersand offers an excellent analysis of anti-fat bias in a recent study, thereby tearing the study to shreds.

4. Bush’s Midnight Attack on Farm Workers: These will be the most far-reaching changes in the laws regulating agricultural guestworker programs since 1942. They will return us to an era of agricultural labor exploitation that many thought ended decades ago. –Via A Slant Truth.

5. Neo-Nazis and the U.S. Military.

There’s a really interesting and almost poetic article about light pollution up on the National Geographic website.

Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.

Hmm.

1. Great Expectations — Melissa McEwan on the importance of expecting great things of the Obama administration.

2. Taslim Solangi–links at Off Our Pedestals.

3. One person’s experience in a participatory economic work model, via Enough.

4. Serve Your Country Food–a project around mapping, organizing, and encouraging young farmers, via WorldChanging.

5. American Family Association recommends burning cross as yard decoration this Christmas.

Check out these found object chandeliers at Oobject. Most notably this one.

The first is via Alas, A Blog, and is very cute.

Couldn’t catch most of the lyrics, but I’m sure it’s going to be stuck in my head for weeks regardless.

The second video, via Boing Boing, is an eerie and telling montage of the three presidential debates.

Did watching the 2nd and 3rd debates give you a feeling of déjà vu? This montage of synced-up footage from all three presidential debates confirms our deep-seated belief that every debate was exactly the same.

Watch it here.

Brent Green makes dark, haunting, wonderful short films. Here’s part 1 (of 2) of his “Paulina Holler”:

Part 2 here.

I also recommend Hadacol Christmas, which is also great but a little less creepy.

Thumbs up, Brent!

Just two things.

1. Banksy’s Village Pet Store And Charcoal Grill (via). Neat.

2. Have Giant Indian Catfish Developed A Taste For Human Flesh? Probably!

1. H.R. 5840- “Capitalizing on Crisis”.

2. Court rules in Diane Schroer’s favor, finding that anti-trans discrimination counts as sex discrimination.

3. Judge bans woman from bearing children.

4. Medics detained and harassed in Galveston.

5. Customs agents now legally allowed to seize, read, and copy travelers’ documents without cause of suspicion.

A lovely story today via Boing Boing.

Karen Hanrahan teaches a workshop called “Healthy Choices for Children,” aimed at parents concerned about the foods their kids are eating.

One of her favorite teaching tools is a McDonald’s hamburger which she bought in the year 1996. It’s an effective example of what not to eat or feed your children, you see, because it has remained remarkably unchanged for the past 12 years. See for yourself.

People always ask me – what did you do to preserve it ?

Nothing – it preserved itself.

(Emphasis hers). Yowza!

Daisy and I, along with some of our other friends, have long talked of a road trip to visit ghost towns in the U.S. I think I’ve just stumbled across our first road map. 7 Scary Ghost Towns: Eternal Remnants From Abandonment, Death and Destruction.

Via this Dark Roasted Blend link latte.

1. Grassroots preparation for more ICE raids, via ImmigrationProf Blog.

2. Gardasil to be made mandatory for U.S. immigrants?

3. “50 Arrested as ADAPT Takes Affordable, Accessible Housing Crisis to Congress.”

4. Two posts at Echidne of the Snakes on the Wall Street bailout. Echidne recommends reading about this alongside Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. As someone doing just that, I couldn’t second that recommendation more eagerly.

5. Margaret Cho disappoints.

I read this article at The Onion when it came out last month, and I have been haunted by it ever since.

Shortly after his mommy, homemaker Ellen Bolduc, 31, assured him that he would be able to resume playtime “when school lets out,” Connor’s innocent brain only then began to work out the implication of that sentence to its inevitable, soul-crushing conclusion.

After learning that the first grade will continue for eight excruciating months beyond that date, it was only a matter of time before Bolduc inquired into what grade comes after first grade, and, when told, would probe further into how many grades he will have to complete before allowed to play with his friends.

That last sentence in particular runs through my head almost everyday. You should read the whole thing.

In all seriousness, I hereby vow not to send my children to formal school, on the basis of that article alone.

Well, it appears that the end has not (yet) come to pass, and the first Large Hadron Collider experiments have been successful.

The world’s largest atom smasher’s first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.

More experimentation to come.

1. Police brutality at the DNC.

2. ICE commits largest immigration raid in U.S. history – and a call for help.

3. Police raids on potential peaceful RNC protesters.

4. Sexualizing sweatshops makes for shitty ad campaign.

5. Mad cow disease with a side of the Bush administration’s special brand of hypocrisy.

Via Fitness For The Occasion (and do read Dan’s post!), here is Amy Goodman’s illegal arrest by riot cops at the Republican National Convention:

Two producers of Democracy Now were also violently arrested. All three have been released now. You can hear more about it straight from them here and here.

Last year we posted a haunting lecture by Naomi Wolf about this country’s rapid slide into fascism. I think of that talk often, particularly two things Wolf said: firstly, the phrase “They did this in Germany,” said to her by a German friend who’d witnessed it herself.* As the grandchild of Holocaust escapees,** that sentence is more horrifying than I can explain.

The other thing I often recall is Wolf’s comment that, though she is (was) speaking out, there would come a time when she would be too afraid to do so. That point, she said, is the point at which “people like [her]” — meaning writers and journalists — start getting detained, tortured, and disappeared in the manner that the government already does to alleged “enemy combatants.”

This event is another landmark on the road to fascism. We are now so close to the moment that Wolf described, only the clear gaze of history can reveal whether that line has yet been crossed.

* If I recall correctly.
** I hesitate to use the word “survivors,” because, by many strokes of freakish luck, my relatives managed to get to safe countries alive and without ever seeing the inside of a camp. The fact remains, though, that my maternal grandparents got out more or less by the skin of their teeth, and were profoundly traumatized for their entire lives.

Since becoming Lost obsessed, I’ve started to fly differently. Once calm and comfortable with air travel, I now take special note of who is around me, and fearfully wonder who among my fellow passengers might make a good boar hunter and who’d be the first to suffer a fatal accident should we crash-land on a mysterious island somewhere in the south pacific…

I worry about comparatively more mundane accidents as well (like running out of fuel mid-flight and not being able to land safely, of getting large and destructive airborne objects caught in the engine and falling downwards through the sky). Or fires. Luckily, the Times provides tips for surviving that last dreadful scenario.

They’re few, and pretty obvious: sit in an aisle seat within five aisles of an emergency exit. But it’s nice to know numbers.

Passengers sitting towards the front of the aircraft had a 65 per cent chance of escaping a fire, while the survival rate for those at the rear was 53 per cent. The survival rate in aisle seats was 64 per cent, compared with 58 per cent for other passengers.

And:

The study found that the passengers who died were on average sitting more than twice as far away from a usable exit as those who survived. Some of the dead, most of whom were killed by toxic fumes, were sitting 15 rows from the nearest usable exit.

Now don’t be fighting me for those seats!

Via Boing Boing, here’s a short video of Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom molding and baking bread into disturbingly realistic looking human body parts. I’m warning you, it’s gruesome. Like watching a serious slasher flick, minus the screaming.

Ack!

I very much hope this terrifying creature isn’t real.

I’ll post an update when it’s debunked as Photoshop, God willing.

I know the blog has been YouTube-heavy lately, but I could resist these.

1. A musical sculpture by one Bruce Gray. Neat!

2. An “air ape” by one Joshua Harris — an ape made of plastic bags, inflated by the air coming out of a subway vent. It’s kind of terrifying.

Daran sent another great link today: a video showing the making of a sculpted baby cake. We’ve mentioned these very cakes before, so striking are they.

Watching her work, one can really see the artistry there: she’s a sculptor. And yet I can’t get over the fact that, in theory at least, that sleeping baby is meant to be eaten.

Daran sent me a strange link in comments: this very disturbing television tower, located in Prague. The tower is swarmed by ten enormous, faceless babies; they’re crawling up and down it. What the hell?

Mark Jenkins meets… Encephalitic Goya? According the afore linked post, the sculptor responsible is one David Černý.

* Presumably.

Two collections to view at OObject:

First, medical manikins. I vote the ones with braces as the creepiest.

Secondly, and more wondrous, these gorgeous pocket sundials. I especially lust for ownership of items 2 and 3.

WANT.