The researchers found that the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism. Buffardi said this is consistent with how narcissists behave in the real-world, with numerous yet shallow relationships. Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, she said, while others are more likely to use snapshots.

Since OPERATION Iraqi Freedom began in 2003, more than 700 US soldiers have been infected or colonized with Acinetobacter baumannii. A significant number of additional cases have been found in the Canadian and British armed forces, and among wounded Iraqi civilians. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has recorded seven deaths caused by the bacteria in US hospitals along the evacuation chain. Four were unlucky civilians who picked up the bug at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, while undergoing treatment for other life-threatening conditions. Another was a 63-year-old woman, also chronically ill, who shared a ward at Landstuhl with infected coalition troops.

[T]he Pentagon had accidentally invented a machine for accelerating bacterial evolution and was airlifting the pathogens halfway around the world.

And those are just the microorganisms that we are allowed to know about. With some “luck”, the US may end up accelerating development of the next global pandemic in their grisly dungeons and combat hospitals and then use their intricate base network to get it all over the world. All in all sort of funny and ironic given that the rationale for the US war in Iraq allegedly was about uncovering so called weapons of mass destruction.

The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government’s US Department of Agriculture– Delta & Pine Land– is about to become part of the world’s largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.

Relations between Monsanto, Delta & Pine Land and the USDA, on closer scrutiny, show the deep and dark side of the much-heralded genetic revolution in agriculture. It proves deep-held suspicions that the Gene Revolution is not about ‘solving the world hunger problem’ as its advocates claim. It’s about handing over control of the seeds for mankind’s basic food supply—rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton—to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer—let’s say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan—whether they will or won’t get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International.

In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.

In European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, and France, more than 80 percent of adults surveyed said they accepted the concept of evolution.

The only country included in the study where adults were more likely than Americans to reject evolution was Turkey.

The investigation also showed that the percentage of U.S. adults who are uncertain about evolution has risen from 7 percent to 21 percent in the past 20 years.

So it is actually getting worse. Welcome to the dark ages.

Perhaps people who really believe in IQ tests, like the subset of people that on getting a high score, decide to join the club of mental mediocrity – MENSA, probably aren’t particularly intelligent.

IQ tests remain one of the top ten myths that are propagated for the benefit of the elite and their continued hegemony. A great lie if you will, right up there with gold, diamonds, just / discrete war theory, the post-Freudian cult of the self etc.

But I will still note that it rings hollow to claim to save lives (or embryos which wouldn’t by most standards be ‘alive’ and by all accounts were discarded anyway) with a dimwitted measure like this while having killed millions abroad. Some respect for human lives that. But it’s the same foul stench that runs right through the American project such as it has become. The same nickelodeon mickey mouse show that obscures the true horrors and the price of maintained nationality and hegemony.

However, it’s too early to break out the champagne because Germany just started pushing a similar idea for a EU that is currently deeply divided. We do seem to have our share of fundamentalists to purge over here as well.

Croats and Serbs united on Monday in celebrating late scientist Nikola Tesla, hailing him as a symbol of ethnic tolerance badly needed in the Balkans.

Tesla was born 150 years ago this day in this small village at the foot of Mt Velebit in a Serb area of Croatia. He made most of his discoveries on electricity in the United States.

His birthplace saw some of the fiercest fighting in Croatia’s 1991-95 independence war with local ethnic Serb rebels. Tesla’s monument was blown up during the war, his house neglected by the nationalist regime that ruled until 2000.

Also honoured by Boing Boing, Damn Interesting.

10 July 2006 marks what would be the 150th birthday of the great inventor Nikola Tesla. For those who could make it, Tesla is immortalized as a statue at Niagara, New York depicting the master of lighting; a Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia; and he is featured on the Serbian 100 dinar banknote. For those who cannot reach such exotic locales, later this year a movie by Christopher Nolan (who really should be working on a follow up to “Batman Begins”) will depict David Bowie as the good Mr Tesla.

Nikola Tesla biography on: Rotten Wikipedia

In her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, June 2006), right-wing pundit Ann Coulter devotes two chapters to a bizarre attempt to disprove the theory of evolution. With a mix of misleading claims, pseudo-scientific arguments, distortions of evolutionary theory, and outright falsehoods, Coulter places herself not only outside the mainstream but truly toward the lunatic fringe. After all, no reasonable person argues that one cannot believe in God and simultaneously accept the findings of decades of accumulated research on evolution. Yet, Coulter appears to believe that in order to prove that liberals are “godless,” she must attack evolutionary theory itself.

The funniest thing about the ‘Flatulent Raccoon Theory’ of course is that it, like Creationism itself, or indeed the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ it suggests a central creator figure. So, basically, if Coulter really believes in some form of Creationism (though most likely she is just an attention-whore) she is in fact lampooning her own beliefs without realizing it. But then again, it takes a dull mind to champion bizarre and backward ideas in the first place.

Only one person in the above thread came to this realistic conclusion, noting that we have put ourselves in a social prison of sorts that no technology can ever break us out of. First there is the obvious problem with capitalists, and adding insult to injury, most people would never be able to adjust to not having to work, having spent a while in the ferret wheel. The sort of theoretical bravado of blank slates, end-of-the-world-scenarios and natural states required to get oneself out of this conundrum is simply staggering.

As a technocrat, I know that technology does indeed promise these utopian visions, the problem, as always, is really all the “pink goo” that stands in the way of true progress. Not just research reports amassing on a library shelf or fantastic quarter earnings by transnationals, but actual progress that impacts and directly improves the lives of ordinary people.

Plans to track the movements of once-free Americans continue to march forward. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are being put into everything from your passport to your pets. Plans to tag immigrants – even legal ones – are already being discussed in Washington. Now, one of the world’s leading drug makers is tagging HIV patients.

GlaxoSmithKline has begun placing RFID tags on all bottles of their drug Trizivir, given to HIV-positive patients in an effort to keep AIDS from developing. Now anyone carrying the medication can be tracked.

It doesn’t take much of an effort or an inclination for the conspiratorial to see how this could be misused. Plus it ties in with immaterial law as the rationale for the tagging is that Trizivir is “among the 32 drugs most susceptible to counterfeiting.” Well, for starters, this field test is only going to happen in the US currently, where counterfeiting is not such a monumental problem as GSK and the FDA would have us believe. It is also difficult frankly to envision how exactly this will stop people from buying and selling counterfeited drugs. It all sounds nice and all when inside the supply chain of GSK, which probably works well in the US, but again, that is not where counterfeiting is rife. And one would also have to sharply distinguish between “fake” and “real” drugs, as the WHO definition explains:

Counterfeit medicines are part of the broader phenomenon of substandard pharmaceuticals – medicines manufactured below established standards of safety, quality and efficacy. They are deliberately and fraudulently mislabelled with respect to identity and/or source. Counterfeiting can apply to both branded and generic products and counterfeit medicines may include products with the correct ingredients but fake packaging, with the wrong ingredients, without active ingredients or with insufficient active ingredients.

I have no sympathy for pharma going after generics or counterfeited drugs with the correct ingredients obviously. Which is what they probably will do using these sob stories as a cover. The entire plot reeks of dishonesty and the introduction of RFID tagging is just too convenient.