complexity 5.com.0003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A pair of 77,000-year-old pieces of engraved ochre found in a South African cave lend credence to the view that symbolic forms of thinking, considered crucial for modern human behavior, emerged surprisingly early in the Stone Age.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

An international research team led by Christopher S. Henshilwood of the South African Museum in Cape Town unearthed the artifacts in the Blombos Cave near the country's southern tip. Both chunks of ochre have surfaces that were ground smooth before cross-hatched designs were etched into them, the researchers report in a forthcoming issue of Science.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us

The scientists determined the engraved objects' age by analyzing radioactive isotopes in charred bits of stone from the layer of soil in which the artifacts were unearthed.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

vaccine 5.vac.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Firing new shots in the malaria war, a vaccine still in the testing stage is now a step closer to becoming a public health reality [Science News]. Two field trials in Kenya and Tanzania showed that the experimental drug reduced malaria infections by more than 50 percent in infants and young children; if a final set of trials proves that the vaccine is indeed safe and effective, the vaccine could be ready for use by 2011. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG





If the phase three trials are successful, it would be “an extraordinary scientific triumph,” said Dr. W. Ripley Ballou, deputy director for vaccines and infectious diseases for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped fund the research. But more importantly,” Ballou added, “it could save millions of children’s lives” [Los Angeles Times]. Malaria kills about 1 million people around the world each year, and most of the victims are children under the age of five.

In the two studies, both published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers say they didn’t expect the vaccine to be 100 percent effective against malaria, unlike vaccines against diseases like smallpox and measles. However, even partial protection would be a great advance, researchers say. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO






There are several types of malaria parasite, all spread among humans by mosquitoes. The vaccine, dubbed RTS,S by its maker GlaxoSmithKline, targets the protozoan Plasmodium falciparum, which causes the most severe form of the disease [Science News]. Malaria is a particularly difficult disease to fight because people can be reinfected by mosquitoes many times in their lives; current efforts to combat infections in Africa focus largely on preventative measures like mosquito nets around beds and insecticides.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET

The development of this promising vaccine illustrates how some deep-pocketed charities are breathing new life into research for potentially life-saving drugs that pharmaceutical companies saw as too risky or unprofitable to pursue. In 1999, as Glaxo was planning to abandon the malaria vaccine amid scepticism about markets, the Belgian unit doing the research made the unusual move of applying for a grant from the Gates Foundation. Since then, the foundation has poured some $107.6 million into developing the vaccine

pregnant 88.pre.10 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Pregnant women exposed to moderate amounts of several common air pollutants have babies with lower birthweights than do women in areas with cleaner air, according to a new study.http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Newborns with low birthweights face an increased risk of lifelong health problems. Previous studies searching for a link between air pollution and birthweight had yielded mixed results.

Now, in one of the largest studies of this kind, scientists at Yale University looked at records of 358,504 births in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The team found that four types of air pollution correlate with low birthweight. The culprits are carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and two classes of airborne particles: those smaller than 10 and smaller than 2.5 micrometers (designated PM2.5).

"Maternal exposure to air pollution may adversely affect risk of low birthweight, even in areas without high pollution levels," says Michelle L. Bell, lead scientist on the newly reported work. Air-pollution amounts were based on Environmental Protection Agency records for the 15 counties in which the women lived while pregnant. Only two counties—New Haven and Fairfield, Conn.—didn't meet EPA's air-quality standards, exceeding the standard for PM2.5.

Carbon monoxide showed the largest effect. In one comparison, the scientists considered the average birthweights in counties at the 75 percent point in rank for a given pollutant and in counties at the 25 percent mark. For carbon monoxide, infants in those groups differed in birthweight by an average of 16.2 grams. The next-worst offender was PM2.5, which showed a difference of 14.7 g, the scientists report online and in an upcoming Environmental Health Perspectives.

These differences in birthweight can increase the newborn's risk of complications such as gastrointestinal infections and respiratory problems in the first weeks of life, comments Srimathi Kannan of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

However, only 4 percent of the babies in the study met the clinical standard for low birthweight—less than 2,500 g (about 5.5 pounds)—which is associated with life-threatening complications in infancy and heart disease in adulthood. A woman's risk of having a low-birthweight baby increased by no more than 5.4 percent when she lived in a county at the 75 percent mark for air pollutants rather than in a county at the 25 percent mark. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

In arriving at these results, the researchers adjusted for many factors that can influence birthweight, such as prenatal care, gestational length, type of delivery, and the child's sex and birth order. They also considered the mother's race, education, marital status, age, and tobacco use, all of which have been shown to influence the weights of newborns. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

The new study is "much more comprehensive in its investigation" than previous research, Kannan says, noting that the biological mechanisms linking these pollutants to reduced fetal growth are still poorly understood. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

komodo 66.kom.3991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A young Komodo dragon will spontaneously mouth and paw at a Frisbee and make other gestures that "would be considered play in a dog or cat," says Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/

Behaviorists wrestling with the problem of describing and explaining play haven't paid much attention to reptiles, Burghardt says. Yet for decades, observers have recorded anecdotes of young Komodo dragons doing things that lack obvious utility and suggest whimsical antics. When a Komodo dragon egg hatched at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., Burghardt jumped at the chance to make systematic observations as the youngster grew up. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/

Burghardt and his colleagues worked with zoo staff for 2 years to videotape 31 sessions with the young female Komodo dragon, named Kraken, as keepers put new objects into her enclosure. Besides a Frisbee, the novelties they offered her included plastic rings, a shoe, a bucket, and a tin can.

Kraken typically nudged them with her snout, swiped at them with her paw, and carried them around in her mouth. She treated them differently from her food, and Burghardt says the tapes "disprove the view that object play is just food-motivated predatory behavior." http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/

The tapes also show Kraken seemingly eager for social play. In one session, she eased up behind caretaker Trooper Walsh, who managed to stand almost still. Kraken then reached up to his rear pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and stood near him with it in her mouth. He reached to grab it, and the two of them both pulled at it in what Burghardt says looks, even to the trained eye, like someone playing tug-of-war with a puppy.

training 333.tra.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Among physically healthy seniors, advancing age often takes a toll on memory and other mental abilities. There's encouraging news, though, for those who want to boost their brainpower.

A brief training course in any of three domains of thought�memory, reasoning, or visual concentration�yields marked improvement on tests of these cognitive skills, according to the largest geriatric study to date of these instructional techniques. The enhancement lasts for at least 2 years. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

"Improvements in memory, problem-solving, and concentration following training roughly counteracted the degree of cognitive decline that we would expect to see over a 7-to-14-year period among older people without dementia," says psychologist Karlene Ball of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US Ball and her colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 13 Journal of the American Medical Association.

It's not yet clear whether training-induced effects translate into improved thinking in everyday situations, cautions Ball. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

In their study, the scientists recruited 2,832 men and women, ages 65 to 94.

They came primarily from senior-housing sites, community centers, and medical facilities in six urban regions of the United States. Participants were in good health and living independently. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

These volunteers were randomly assigned to one of three training groups or a control group that didn't receive any training. One course of instruction focused on ways to improve memory for word lists and stories. Another bolstered reasoning in problems analogous to daily tasks such as reading a bus schedule. A third coached participants to identify visual information quickly in computer displays that corresponded to challenges such as reading traffic signs while driving.

Each training course consisted of 10 roughly hour-long sessions over 5 to 6 weeks. Most who completed training received a refresher set of four training sessions 11 months later.

Immediately after the first round of sessions, 26 percent of memory-trained participants, 74 percent of reasoning-coached volunteers, and 87 percent of those instructed in visual concentration showed substantial improvement on the targeted skill. While most members of the no-training group showed no change or declined, a small number improved as much as those who had received training. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

The proportion of trained participants scoring markedly above their starting value dipped slightly over the next 2 years but remained greater than the proportion of untrained volunteers who upped their performance similarly.

Refresher sessions enhanced training-induced gains in reasoning and visual concentration but not in memory.

"I think we can build on these results to see how training ultimately might be applied to tasks that older people do everyday, such as using medication or handling finances," comments psychologist Richard M. Suzman of the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md.

India Moon

Amid its first economic slowdown in three years, India is getting ready to shoot the moon.

On Wednesday, the country is scheduled to launch its first unmanned moon mission, when lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 blasts into space aboard an Indian-made rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in the country's south.

View Full Image

European Pressphoto Agency

India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, under wraps in Sriharikota, will carry payloads for five other countries on its two-year lunar-orbit mission.

The launch will put India into an Asian space race, which last year saw Japan and China launch lunar orbiters. Sites in those countries are regularly used for launching commercial satellites.

The Chandrayaan-1 mission is the Indian Space and Research Organization's first attempt to propel a spacecraft beyond the Earth's atmosphere, although India has been launching suborbital satellites since 1975. About 1,000 scientists and engineers have worked on the lunar project for four years.

The $80 million two-year mission -- during which the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is expected to orbit about 60 miles from the lunar surface -- will conduct a series of experiments on the moon's mineral, geological and chemical characteristics, as well as searching for evidence of water on the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-1 is carrying payloads for 11 scientific experiments, including five from India, two from the U.S. space agency, NASA, and one each from Germany, Britain, Sweden and Bulgaria.

A successful launch will make India the third Asian nation to place a satellite in lunar orbit. China's Chaang'e I lunar satellite was launched in October 2007, after Japan launched its Kaguya lunar orbiter in September.

India's space program has its critics. Some argue that the Indian government is spending millions on space exploration while ignoring poverty at home, where per capita income is less than $1,000 a year, public health and education services are poor, and rising food and fuel prices are pinching citizens.

It also comes at a time when India's booming economic growth has begun to slow amid the global financial crisis. Inflation-adjusted growth in gross domestic product fell to 7.9% in the quarter ended June 30, falling below 8% for the first time in three years.

C.S. Unnikrishnan, a scientist with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in Mumbai, says that the lunar mission is driven by ISRO's desire to promote its business arm. "This mission will only project ISRO as a major player in commercial launch systems," he said. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/

ISRO has launched satellites for customers from Germany, Belgium, Indonesia and Argentina since 2001. The global marketing wing of ISRO, Bangalore-based Antrix Corp. had revenue of $192 million in the year ended March 31. Antrix says the "ISRO launch services are economical compared to other Asian competitors." http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/

The lunar mission is strongly supported by India's Congress-led government and even the country's nationalistic leftist party leaders. "Opposing the mission would be demoralizing for our scientific community," says Atul Kumar Anjaan, national secretary of the Communist Party of India. "Such projects are a national pride and involve years of innovation."

Hadrian 1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Hadrian (117 - 138 AD)

Family and Background

Nephew of Trajan, he appears to have been marked out for the succession at an early age, but to have fallen from favor in the middle years of Trajan's reign. He was, however, strongly supported by Trajan's wife, Plotina, who is said to have engineered his adoption and succession as Trajan lay dying (there were runors that she did so in his name after he had died).

Principal Events (Foriegn)

• Settlement with Parthia (117)
• Defeat of northern British tribes (119)
• Building of great defensive wall to mark the frontier in Britain (121-122)
• Constructon of extensive fortified lines along the Rhine (121-122, probably)

http://louis2j2sheehan.us

Principal Events (Domestic)

• Suppression of the great Jewish revolt (117)
• Execution of four ex-consuls (and friends of Trajan) on charges of treason (117)
• Return to Rome and funeral of Trajan (conversion of the column of Trajan into Trajan's tomb) (118)
• Journey to Britain, Gaul, Germany and Spain (121-123)
• Death of Plotina (122)
• Journey to Greece and Asia Minor (123-125)
• Return to Sicily and Italy (125)
• Journey to North Africa, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine and Egypt (128-134)
• Foundation of the League of the Greeks at Athens (October, 128)
• Death of Antinoos (Hadrian's lover) near Hermopolis in Egypt, foundation of cult in his honor (October 30, 130)
• Outbreak of the Bar-Kockba revolt in Palestine (132)
• Return to Rome (132)
• Suppression of the Bar-Kockba revolt (135)
• Execution of Pedanious Fuscus (heir apparent) and Servianus (his uncle, who played a role in both his and Trajan's accession) (136)
• Death of L. Aelius Caesar (heir apparent)(137)
• Adoption of Antoninus Pius who, in turn, was required to adopt Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus
• Death at Baiae (July 10, 138)http://louis2j2sheehan.us

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

brca1/2 0000193.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Asian women at risk for breast and ovarian cancers may not be getting the genetic screening that could save them. The reason: computer models commonly used to assess whether women should be tested for harmful genetic mutations may underestimate the risk in families of Asian descent, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com



To determine which patients would benefit from genetic testing for breast and ovarian malignancies, physicians routinely use the BRCAPRO and Myriad II computer models. By providing a woman's family history of these cancers, including the ages they were diagnosed, the programs calculate a probability that the patient carries a harmful mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2 (genes involved in controlling malignant cell growth). A woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer increases five-fold or more if she carries mutations in these genes, which underlie up to 10 percent of breast and 15 percent of ovarian cancers.

Current models were designed using data from Caucasian women, primarily from northern Europe and the U.S., raising the question of their utility in assessing mutation risks for other populations. Recent research showed that the software works relatively well in women of Hispanic and African-American descent, but this new study found that in Asian populations the current scheme missed half of the women carrying the mutation.

For physicians this translates into "missed opportunities to protect patients from bad outcomes," says study leader Allison Kurian, an oncologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. Mayo Clinic geneticist Noralane Lindor says there is no magic number that dictates testing but that physicians are more likely to closely monitor and refer for screening patients flagged by the computer programs as having a higher probability of mutation.

The study, which compared each model's success in Caucasian women with those of Asian descent (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and Vietnamese), also raised important questions about the effect of race on cancer development: When Caucasian and Asian patients with similar family histories of breast and ovarian cancer were compared, the Asian women had higher rates of genetic mutation, although the rates of these cancers for Asians have traditionally been lower. This could indicate, Kurian says, that BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are not as informative for predicting future cancer in this population as it is in whites.

Kurian notes these differences in cancer outcome may - indicate that Asian women have protective genes that Caucasians lack. Some studies have also suggested that diet (particularly fish and tofu), along with environmental factors may play a role in lower cancer rates—although the incidence of breast and ovarian cancer in Asian populations is currently rising. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com



Further research will be necessary to determine how often BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations actually occur in Asian groups and what these mutations really mean for Asian women in terms of cancer risk.

Steven Narod, director of the Familial Breast Cancer Research Unit at Women's College Research Institution in Toronto, believes that cost and not flawed computer programs are to blame for undertesting. The only reason these models are even used, he notes, is because Myriad Genetics, Inc., (in Salt Lake City, Utah) holds a patent for the BRCA1/BRCA2 genetic test and charges patients a hefty $3,120 a pop.

Banu Arun, an oncologist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, says that beyond cost physicians must also consider the psychological impact of testing and women's fears that a BRCA1/2 positive test either could spur insurance companies to drop them or raise their rates through the roof. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

For now, though, health care providers will continue to use these computer models, however imperfect they may be, to assess women's genetic risks. Although future research will no doubt focus on fine-tuning current models for nonwhite groups, for now Kurian recommends that Asian women and their doctors err on the side of caution when using them to consider genetic testing.

prenatal 0000301 Louis J. Sheehan

Louis J. Sheehan

Scientists have long known that testosterone regulates males' sexual behavior and brain characteristics, although how it does so is poorly understood. New findings indicate that testosterone amps up the masculinity of the infant rat brain by inducing production of a substance that's key to sexual development.

Male rats exposed shortly before or after birth to drugs that block manufacture of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) exhibit impaired sexual behavior as adults, say Stuart K. Amateau and Margaret M. McCarthy, neuroscientists at the University of Maryland at Baltimore School of Medicine. In their trials, groups of newborn male rats received injections of saline or indomethacin and adult females received aspirin during pregnancy or lactation. Indomethacin and aspirin block an enzyme that's crucial for synthesizing PGE2. Indomethacin, but not saline, impaired later sexual behavior of the injected newborns. Maternal aspirin affected sexual behavior of the offspring as adults, but to a lesser extent than indomethacin did. http://www.thoughts.com/Zeta0Reticuli0Louis0J0Sheehan0/blog

If these findings are confirmed in people, the researchers say, it will raise concerns about pregnant women's use of PGE2-blocking drugs, which also include acetaminophen. Doctors currently prescribe indomethacin to prevent premature labor.

Male rats receiving indomethacin as pups later showed signs of having unusually few neural connections in the preoptic area, an inner-brain structure previously implicated in sexual behavior, Amateau and McCarthy report in the June Nature Neuroscience. Adult female rats typically possess a comparably low number of connections, or synapses, in that area. http://www.thoughts.com/Zeta0Reticuli0Louis0J0Sheehan0/blog

"What's striking is that brief exposure to prostaglandin blockers around the time of birth has lasting effects on synapses in males' preoptic area," McCarthy says.

The pups that received indomethacin also displayed little sexual activity as adults, while those males whose mothers had received aspirin initiated sexual activity only after several exposures to fertile females.

A contrasting picture emerged in female rats given a male hormonal profile. When a female received injections of PGE2 shortly after birth, bolstered with testosterone during adulthood, she exhibited malelike sexual behavior, such as trying to copulate with fertile females, and a masculine-style preoptic area chock-full of synapses.

To determine the abundance of synapses in the preoptic area, Amateau and McCarthy measured spinophilin, a protein that acts on the synapse-forming spines that branch off nerve cells. A high concentration of spinophilin corresponds to a synaptic bounty typical of males.

Although PGE2 blockage affected males' preoptic area, their blood concentrations of testosterone were similar to those of animals injected only with saline.

"These data suggest a new and unexplored mechanism . . . that directs sexual differentiation of the brain," remark neuroscientist Erich N. Ottem of Michigan State University in East Lansing and his colleagues in a comment published with the new report.

A study of whether prenatal exposure to PGE2-sapping drugs influences people's sexual behavior is now under way. A team led by psychologist Melissa Hines of City University in London plans to use anonymous questionnaires to monitor sexual behaviors in more than 600 youngsters, now 13 years old, who have been tracked since birth. About half of the teens' mothers reported taking acetaminophen during pregnancy.

unrest

Louis J. Sheehan

Insomnia and other sleep problems frequently afflict people with bipolar disorder, even when they're taking medications that quell their extreme emotional highs and lows, a new study suggests. Fear and anxiety that sleep loss will trigger bouts of mania or depression—the cardinal features of bipolar disorder—wreak havoc on slumber among these individuals, say psychologist Allison G. Harvey of the University of California, Berkeley and her colleagues.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

The researchers compared interview and questionnaire responses of 20 adults with bipolar disorder, 20 people with insomnia, and 20 good sleepers. All 60 volunteers also kept sleep diaries for 8 consecutive days. During that time, small devices worn on the wrist monitored each person's physical motion at night.

Fourteen of the participants with bipolar disorder reported significant sleep problems, Harvey's group reports in the January American Journal of Psychiatry. Of that number, 11 qualified for a diagnosis of insomnia. Even though the bipolar volunteers were taking medications to keep their symptoms at bay, they expressed concerns that their bouts of mania and depression would return.

In their interviews and on the questionnaires, the volunteers with bipolar disorder cited failures to establish a bedtime routine and to clear their minds of intrusive thoughts when trying to sleep. They also overestimated how long it took them to fall asleep by about 40 minutes and underestimated their total sleep time by more than 1 hour. The people with insomnia had similar misperceptions, the but good sleepers didn't.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

The scientists plan to investigate whether psychotherapy that teaches bipolar patients how to alter their angst-ridden beliefs about sleep yields better slumber and fewer relapses.

group

A common childhood language disorder stems from a brain-based difficulty in discerning the acoustic building blocks of spoken words, especially in noisy settings such as classrooms, a new study suggests.

Researchers estimate that as many as 7 percent of U.S. elementary school students experience substantial problems in understanding what others say and in speaking comprehensibly, despite good physical health, normal hearing, and average-or-better intelligence. The precise grammatical failures of children with this condition, known as specific language impairment (SLI), remain controversial.http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205

Psychologist Johannes C. Ziegler of the University of Provence in Marseille, France, and his colleagues find that these children's subtle problems in identifying spoken consonants in quiet settings become far worse with the addition of background noise.

In kids free of language problems and in youngsters with SLI, constant background noise disrupted consonant detection more than intermittent background noise did. But both types of background sounds undermined speech perception much more in children with the language disorder than in the others, the scientists report in the Sept. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ziegler's group studied 20 French children, most 10 to 11 years old, who had been diagnosed with SLI at a Marseille hospital. Testing also included 20 kids, ages 10 to 11, and another 20 kids, most 8 to 9 years old, all with no language problem. The researchers included the younger group because their language skills were similar to those of the 10- and 11-year-olds with SLI.

Participants listened through headphones to a woman uttering a series of vowel-consonant-vowel combinations, such as aba, ada, and aga. Their job was to repeat each utterance or to point it out from among 16 choices displayed on a computer screen.

In some trials, it was quiet as the woman spoke. In others, she spoke over either a steady background tone or a tone that faded in and out in a regular sequence.http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205

The children with SLI correctly identified 95 percent of the consonants presented without background noise, only slightly below the near-perfect performance of the other two groups. However, consonant detection in the SLI group fell to 72 percent correct with fluctuating background noise and hit 62 percent with static background noise.

Corresponding drop-offs for the other two groups were slight in comparison—with accuracies of 94 percent and 86 percent for older children and 91 percent and 83 percent for younger ones.

Ziegler's group proposes that children with SLI hear just fine, but that their brains have difficulty picking out speech sounds from a stream of acoustic information.

However, some other scientists disagree. For instance, Mabel L. Rice of the University of Kansas in Lawrence suspects that the condition stems from miswiring or delayed growth of brain networks responsible for grammar use.

"It's hard to know if the kids in this new study had SLI as many researchers now define it," Rice remarks. Other investigators have found that the speech-articulation deficits that Ziegler's group observed rarely accompany SLI in the general population of elementary school children but often turn up in medical clinics. So, Rice argues, the test group had problems beyond typical SLI.

belize

http://louis-j-sheehan.com At its most glamorous, the life of an experimental high-energy physicist consists of smashing obscure subatomic particles with futuristic-sounding names into each other to uncover truths about the universe—using science's biggest, most expensive toys in exciting locations such as Switzerland or Illinois.http://louis-j-sheehan.com But it takes a decade or two to plan and build multibillion-dollar atom smashers. While waiting, what's a thrill-seeking physicist to do?

How about using some of the perfectly good, and completely free, subatomic particles that rain down on Earth from space every day to peek inside something really big and mysterious, like, say, a Mayan pyramid? That's exactly what physicist Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas at Austin is preparing to do.

High-energy particles known as muons, which are born of cosmic radiation, have ideal features for creating images of very large or dense objects. Muons easily handle situations that hinder other imaging techniques. Ground-penetrating radar, for instance, can reach only 30 meters below the surface under ideal conditions. And seismic reflection, another method, doesn't fare well in a complex medium. With muons, all you need is a way to capture them and analyze their trajectories.

Besides probing pyramids in Belize and Mexico, physicists are applying the muon method to studying active volcanoes and detecting nuclear materials. The concept sounds out of this world, but it's really quite simple. When cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, collisions with the nuclei of air atoms spawn subatomic particles called pions that quickly decay into muons that continue along the same path. Many of the muons survive long enough to penetrate the Earth's surface. Because of their high energy, the particles can easily pass through great volumes of rock or metal or whatever else they encounter. However, they are deflected from their path by atoms in the material, and the denser the material, the greater the deflection.

Schwitters wants to exploit this deflection to see if there are any rooms or chambers inside a Mayan pyramid in Belize, he told science journalists in Spokane, Wash., at a recent meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. His team is building several muon detectors that would be buried in shallow holes around the base of the pyramid to create an image of what's inside by measuring the trajectories of the muons that pass through it.

"What you see is very much like an X ray," he says. "If you see a spot with more muons, it means there's a space there. If you see fewer muons, it means there's something extra-dense there."

Schwitters won't be the first to marry physics and archaeology in this way. In 1967, Nobel prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez of the University of California, Berkeley placed a muon detector in a chamber beneath the pyramid of Khafra in Egypt to see if it was hiding any burial chambers like those discovered in the larger pyramid of Khufu. He found none, but the experiment showed that the method worked.

From physics to archaeology

As the director of the Superconducting Supercollider laboratory in Texas until 1993, when Congress gave the project the axe, Schwitters is no stranger to waiting for the next big thing. And he has always been intrigued by the possibility of applying the tools of the high-energy physics trade elsewhere, so a chance conversation with one of Alvarez' former colleagues, combined with a little spare time, got Schwitters wondering what other enigmatic ancient structures were waiting to be probed.

Archaeologist Fred Valdez, director of the Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory at UT Austin, had the answer: an enormous pyramid in the third-largest Mayan city in Belize. The city is in an area in northwestern Belize known as La Milpa, which was home to one of the densest populations of Maya from as early as 1000 B.C. until around A.D. 850. The area was packed with four large cities, each with 20,000 or more residents, that were only around 8 to 12 kilometers apart with 60 or more towns, villages, and hamlets in between. Valdez believes there is much to be learned from the society that existed there.

"The amazing part is how close how many of these large cities are to each other," he said. "The Maya were clearly expert at adapting to their environment and exploiting their environment, clearly making better use of things than we are today, just to support the populations that were there."

Because there isn't a chamber below the La Milpa pyramid, Schwitters plans to harness muons with four or five smaller detectors spaced around the structure to get a three-dimensional view inside. Each detector will be a cylinder wrapped with strips of polystyrene, which emits light when hit by a muon. The bursts of light as each particle passes through both sides of the detector will be recorded by photo detectors at the end of the cylinder and used to reconstruct the muon trajectories.

Dense matter will deflect muons away from their paths, so fewer muons will hit the detectors from that area while more particles will pass through empty spaces to reach the detectors. A computer program will translate the information into an image that can be read like a CT scan or an X ray with bright spots indicating voids and dark areas correlating to more dense matter. Because muons hit the Earth at the rate of about 1 per square centimeter per minute, it will take several months to get a good image of the guts of the pyramid. Schwitters hopes he'll be able to resolve chambers as small as a cubic meter.

20/20 hindsight

Knowing exactly where to dig to find potential tombs or other chambers could save precious time when dealing with very large structures like the pyramid in Belize. It could also save artifacts that need special treatment, sometimes within hours, to keep them from deteriorating from exposure. Dust in a tomb that is normally trampled during excavation could contain valuable information about diseases that affected the Maya, or about the plants and herbs they used.

"Ideally, the results would give us a look into the building without having to do the destructive process of excavation," Valdez said.

He envisions being able to drill a small auger hole into a chamber and send a fiber-optic camera down to take a look. That way he can study the chambers exactly as they were left, and the appropriate experts and equipment can be on hand to deal with the contents as they are exposed by coating them with resin, immersing them in water, or sealing them in an airtight case.

"That's tremendous information," he said. "It's almost like 20/20 hindsight."

With funding from Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., and support from UT and National Instruments, Schwitters' team has already built and successfully tested one detector at UT that weighs in around a ton, at 4.5 m long with a 1.5 m diameter. The detectors that will go to Belize will be much smaller, around the size of water heaters and weighing about 200 pounds. Depending on funding, the detectors could be ready for showtime in 2009.

Another team of scientists may be just months away from using muons to image the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, Mexico, in a quest to learn why the pyramid was built. And if burial chambers such as those found in the nearby Pyramid of the Moon are discovered, they could reveal whether the society was ruled by a single person or a government of several leaders.

Led by physicist Arturo Menchaca-Rocha of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the team is currently working out some kinks in its detector having to do with wires cracking from temperature changes. Once that hurdle is cleared, which will likely be sometime after January, their single detector will be placed in a tunnel discovered under the pyramid in 1971, much like Alvarez' experiment in Egypt.

"We are quite delayed," Menchaca-Rocha said in an e-mail from a meeting in Veracruz. "But the pyramid has been sitting there for 2,000 years, so it can wait for us to be perfectly happy about the detector."

Nuclear security

In the meantime, physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are looking to muons to help detect special nuclear materials such as plutonium and uranium at the country's borders. Current nuclear-detection capability relies on identifying the gamma-ray radiation emitted by the materials, but that doesn't always work.

"If someone wants to bring in nuclear material to build a bomb, they need to shield it with something dense like lead to stop the gamma rays," says Los Alamos physicist Chris Morris.

So Morris is working on a detector that would use muons to root out both nuclear materials and shielding. Lead is dense enough to perturb a muon's path, and it is even easier to spot the muon fingerprint of things like plutonium and uranium because their high density and big atomic charge scatter the particles more than anything else.

Los Alamos lab has partnered with Decision Sciences Corporation of San Diego to build a prototype four-sided muon detector that resembles a carport before the end of the year. Vehicles would drive into the device like entering a car wash and wait while detectors on all four sides of the tunnel record muon trajectories. A single muon would be recorded by multiple detectors, revealing any changes in its path.

"It measures the track of every muon going through the vehicle," Morris says. "In 20 seconds you can detect whether or not they have a chunk of metal that's 4 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches. If you went a little longer, you can see something smaller."

Volcanic insight

But the real strength of muon imaging is tackling very large structures, such as volcanoes, that defy other methods. Scientists led by Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo installed a single muon detector 1 kilometer from the summit of Mount Asama on the main island of Japan. By measuring muons traveling nearly horizontally through the volcano, the detector successfully imaged a lava mound that was created a few hundred meters below the crater floor during a 2004 eruption and a conduit below it.

"The cosmic-ray muon imaging technique has much higher resolving power than conventional geophysical techniques, with resolutions up to several meters allowing it to see smaller objects and greater detail in volcanoes," Tanaka wrote in a report on the results of the Mount Asama study in the Nov. 15 Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Tanaka's team has also used muon detection to image a lava dome that has been smoking since 1945 on the flank of Usu volcano in Hokkaido, Japan. Both of Tanaka's current studies involved single detectors. But adding more detectors would give a three-dimensional view and help untangle the effect of higher-density materials on the muons from that of a longer distance traveled through somewhat less-dense material.

"This technique might provide a way to forecast a volcanic eruption by monitoring changes in the density of the magma channel inside the summit region of a volcano," Tanaka writes in a study on the lava dome in the Nov. 16 Geophysical Research Letters.

Even more promising is a real-time digital muon camera that Tanaka is working on that could capture real-time images of an active volcano. He hopes to have one installed with a view of Mt. Asama from 1.5 km away by May 2008, and a second one sometime thereafter that could provide a 3-D picture of Asama's next eruption.

"With this device, I think that the technique would be more practical for use in forecasting eruptions," he wrote in an e-mail from Japan.

Schwitters envisions other geologic studies that could benefit from muon detection, such as gauging the size and location of underground aquifers or assessing the stability of the geology around nuclear-waste depositories. But for now he is content to focus on the pyramids buried under dirt, trees, and vines in the forest in Belize.

"There is good reason to believe they contain rooms and chambers that have not been disturbed since the Maya left, and that's what makes them so exciting," he says.

indonesia

As Lusi, the world’s fastest-growing mud volcano, now stands on the brink of collapsing upon itself, the geologists studying this bizarre dirt-spewing pit now say they are almost certain that a well drilled for natural gas production caused it to form. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Lusi first erupted mud and toxic gas in May 2006, killing 13 people and soaking a dozen east Indonesian villages. Lapindo Brantas, the mining company, said an earthquake two days prior provided the jolt that kick-started the volcano. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de But Michael Manga and his grad student Maria Brumm of the University of California, Berkley investigated that claim, and they found that was highly unlikely the earthquake was the cause. The quake was centered more than 150 miles away from the mud volcano, the researchers say, and none of the ways earthquakes are triggered could explain how it set off Lusi.

But a team of scientists led by Richard Davies of Durham University in the U.K. say that drilling operations ignited the mud monster. When miners dug 3,000 meters into the earth, they hit an aquifer buried deep underneath the mudstone. This released the pressure built up inside the aquifer, the scientists say, which provided the raw power to blow mud all over the place. Since its initial eruption, Lusi has gushed forth 50 to 60 swimming pools worth of mud and muck every day.

As of last week a court in Indonesia said this was a natural occurrence, one of many intriguing turns in the Lusi story. Indonesian welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie is also the country’s richest man, and his family owns the mining company. Then there are the just plain strange elements: Last year, desperate to stop the mud flow but with nothing better to try, the Indonesian government dropped 2,000 concrete balls into the volcano’s vent, Davies says. Nothing happened.

The mud is currently restrained behind retaining walls, and will begin to recede now that the two-year mud eruption is coming to an end. But Lusi’s collapse will leave a huge crater, Davies says, and its center could fall almost 150 meters in the coming decade. This could further fracture the surrounding area, Davies says, even shift the course of rivers. At least the afternoon mud showers should stop.

morrill

May 17, Tuesday. A painful suspense in military operations. It is a necessary suspense, but the intense anxiety is oppressive, and almost unfits the mind for mental activity. We know it cannot be long before one or more bloody battles will take place in which not only many dear friends will be slaughtered but probably the Civil War will be decided as to its continuance, or termination. My faith is firm in Union success, but I shall be glad when faith is past.

There was nothing special to-day at the Cabinet. No information received from the Army of the Potomac. Sherman had had hard fighting in northern Georgia at Resaca, and the Rebels under Johnston have retreated.

The President informs me that four of the Massachusetts delegation have waited upon him in relation to the condition of affairs at the Charlestown Navy Yard. They fear the Navy has too much control, and charge Admiral Smith with opposition to the Administration. I stated briefly to the President some of the difficulties, and that Mr. Gooch was not a free agent when there was a conflict or difference between the Government and the Navy Yard, that G. could not do otherwise than go with the men in the yard, and that Merriam was a cunning fellow who stirred up a citizen’s feeling for selfish purposes.

Things are getting in such condition that I see no alternative but to dismiss the man Merriam. Admiral Stringham writes me that M. has got up a paper or memorial to the Massachusetts Senators and Representatives which he has hired a man to circulate for signatures, remonstrating against the naval management of the yard and getting up a hostile feeling. It is this, I presume, which led to the call on the President. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Met Governor Morrill this evening, who at once spoke of the misconduct of the Treasury agents. We frankly discussed the subject. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire He is on the Committee of Commerce and has a right to know the facts, which I gave him. The whole proceeding is a disgrace and wickedness. I agree with Governor M. that the Secretary of the Treasury has enough to do to attend to the finances without going into the cotton trade. But Chase is very ambitious and very fond of power. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire He has, moreover, the fault of most of our politicians, who believe that the patronage of office, or bestowment of public favors, is a source of popularity. It is the reverse, as he will learn.

uighur

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

The release on Monday of the unclassified parts of the decision followed a brief court notice last week. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.USThe notice said a classified decision had directed the government to release Mr. Parhat, transfer him to another country or conduct a new military hearing at Guantánamo to determine if he had been properly classified as an enemy combatant.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.

Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.

American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Detainees’ lawyers said the ruling in the case of Mr. Parhat, who says he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to escape China, could broadly affect other detainees because of its skeptical view of the government’s evidence.

A lawyer representing other detainees, Marc D. Falkoff, said the evidence against many of the 270 men now at Guantánamo was similar to that in the Parhat case.

“This opinion shows that the government is going to have a hard time defending the military’s decision to detain many of these men,” said Mr. Falkoff, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law.

Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The ruling released Monday overturned the Pentagon’s finding after a 2004 hearing that Mr. Parhat was an enemy combatant based on that affiliation. He and the 16 other Uighurs were detained after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.

“Those bare facts,” the decision said, “cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.”

Some lawyers said the ruling highlighted the difficulties they saw in civilian judges reviewing Guantánamo cases.

“This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making,” said Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy and a national security fellow at Harvard.

The appellate panel reviewed Mr. Parhat’s case under a limited procedure Congress provided for challenging military hearings at Guantánamo. The case was argued before the Supreme Court’s decision on June 12 that detainees have a constitutional right to seek release in more expansive habeas corpus proceedings.

The 17 Uighurs now held at Guantánamo say they are allies, not enemies, of the United States.

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The decision was written by Judge Merrick B. Garland, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. It was joined by Chief Judge Sentelle, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a 2005 appointee of President Bush.

heart

My father was planning a trip to Europe one summer afternoon when he went to the bathroom and didn't return. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.comMy mother found him dead of a heart attack on the bathroom floor. My husband's grandfather's heart gave out as he was walking down the sidewalk in New York.

Everybody knows somebody who has had a sudden, fatal heart attack, and it's many people's secret fear. More than 300,000 Americans die of heart disease without making it to the hospital each year; most of them from sudden cardiac arrest, according to the American Heart Association. In about half of those cases, the heart attack itself is the first symptom.

Deaths from cardiovascular disease in general have dropped dramatically in recent years, but it is still the No. 1 killer of men and women in the U.S. -- claiming more lives than cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, accidents and diabetes combined.

That's in part because, for all the advances doctors have made in understanding risk factors, lowering cholesterol with statins and propping open narrowed arteries with stents, most heart attacks are caused when tiny bits of plaque break loose and burst like popcorn kernels, forming clots that block arteries. That prevents blood from reaching areas of heart muscle, which start to die. It's hard to predict when that might happen -- which is why people who never knew they had heart disease, and people who thought it was under control, still have sudden heart attacks.

WHEN TO CALL 911

• Common heart-attack signs in men:

-Pressure, fullness in chest that may come and go

-Discomfort in arms, neck, back, jaw

-Shortness of breath

-Lightheadedness

• Women more likely to have:

-Sudden sweating

-Shortness of breath

-Nausea/vomiting

-Back or jaw pain

Source: American Heart Association

"We have terrific therapies that were unimaginable 25 or 30 years ago," says E. Scott Monrad, director of the cardiac catheterization lab at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y. "But one of the biggest risks is dying before you even get to see a doctor."

Last weekend, scores of commentators on health and political blogs offered theories about what might have been done to save NBC's Tim Russert, who died of a sudden heart attack at work Friday. Few details were released, other than that the much-loved "Meet the Press" moderator was being treated for asymptomatic coronary artery disease, had diabetes and an enlarged heart, and had a stress test in April. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

Many blog-posters argued that Mr. Russert should have had an angiogram -- an invasive diagnostic test in which the coronary arteries are injected with dye and X-rayed to spot blockages. But even if he had had the procedure an hour before the attack, doctors might not have seen anything to be alarmed about. More than two-thirds of heart attacks occur in arteries that are less than 50% narrowed by plaque buildup -- and those are often too small to show up on an angiogram or cause much chest pain.

Similarly, the stress test Mr. Russert had is better suited to detecting significantly narrowed arteries than the small, soft unstable kind of plaque that often causes fatal blood clots.

Indeed, about a third of people who have heart attacks don't have the usual risk factors, such as family history of heart disease, abdominal fat, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

RISK FACTORS

The symptoms that make up "metabolic syndrome" put people at high risk for heart attack, stroke and diabetes. (Smoking and heavy alcohol consumption also raise the risk.)

• Waist more than 40 inches for men; 35 inches for women

• Blood pressure over 130/85mmHg

• Fasting glucose over 110 mg/dl

• Triglycerides over 150 mg/dl

• LDL cholesterol over 100 mg/dl

• HDL cholesterol under 40 mg/dl

Source: American Medical Association

"Time and again we see examples of unexpected cardiac disease in people who didn't know they had it," says Prediman K. Shah, director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, one of many experts who think wider use of coronary calcium CT scans could help spot more people at risk of soft-plaque blockages. The noninvasive procedure takes about 15 minutes and costs a few hundred dollars. But few insurers cover it because there is scant evidence that treating people on that basis saves lives.

At a minimum, seeing a picture of the calcium lining their arteries can be a wake-up call for patients to take their coronary-artery disease seriously and to be diligent in taking medication, exercising and making other healthy lifestyle changes.

Mr. Russert's family and physicians haven't disclosed how his coronary artery disease was diagnosed, or how he was being treated. NBC colleagues said the 58-year-old journalist had been working to control his condition with exercise and diet, though his weight was an ongoing struggle. He had also returned from a family trip to Italy the day before, following a grueling -- but exhilarating -- political primary season.

Not all heart attacks are fatal. Most of the 1.2 million Americans who had one last year survived. If the area of oxygen-starved heart muscle is small, or in the right ventricle, the heart can often keep pumping, allowing the patient to make it to a hospital, where doctors can break up the blockage with a clot-dissolving drug or catheterization. The situation becomes rapidly fatal if the heart starts beating wildly, and ineffectively, as it struggles to keep pumping. Unless it is jolted back into a normal rhythm within a few minutes, the patient's brain will starve for oxygen and shut down.

Some patients with enlarged hearts like Mr. Russert's are candidates for internal defibrillators that can continuously monitor heart rhythm and keep it regular automatically. Vice President Dick Cheney, who has survived four heart attacks, has one.

Many airports, shopping malls, schools and offices have portable Automatic External Defibrillators, or AEDs, on hand as well. They're designed to automatically assess a victim's heart rhythm and administer an electrical jolt as needed. The NBC office reportedly didn't have an AED, but an intern performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Mr. Russert until paramedics arrived with a defibrillator.

"The earlier CPR is started, the higher the rate of success," says Dr. Monrad, who says he has had several cases in which vigorous CPR in the field bought precious time and saved a life. On average, however, only a small percentage of people in full cardiac arrests are successfully revived.

More widespread use of AEDs and wider CPR training could save some future victims' lives. Some bloggers suggested that more-aggressive treatment of Mr. Russert's artery disease might have bought him some time, though most experts declined to speculate.

But stents, angioplasty and bypass surgery are only stop-gap measures that don't do anything to halt the progress of the underlying disease. "Everytime I do a procedure on a patient, the family comes up and says, 'Now we don't have to worry anymore,' but that's the wrong message," says Dr. Monrad. "Physicians have to be tough on the standards we set for patients, and patients have to be tougher about the kind of lifestyle choices they make."

The heart has many mysteries that scientists are still unraveling, such as what causes those killer bits of plaque to rupture, the role of inflammation, the complex interplay of diet, vitamins and amino acids like homocysteine. Even the size of cholesterol particles is under scrutiny. "The more small LDL particles you have, the higher your risk of heart disease," says Larry McCleary, a former pediatric neurosurgeon at Denver Children's Hospital who had a heart attack while on rounds at age 46, and has since lost weight, reduced his blood pressure and triglycerides, and exercises daily.http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

"It's important that each person take responsibility for taking care of themselves," says Edmund Herrold, a clinical cardiologist in New York City and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. "Get a regular checkup. Watch your weight and your blood pressure and your cholesterol and if you have diabetes, keep that under control. Exercise. Take an aspirin every day. Eliminate meat. There's no guarantee, but you can dramatically lower the risk of a cardiac event if you pay attention to these issues."

German 5th Light Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On 30 April, the Axis forces second attack attempting to push through the perimeter at post S.1 and push through into the centre of Tobruk. http://louis1j1sheehan.usThe attack captured an 8 km wide by 3km deep section of territory. However, the battle caused heavy losses to Rommel's forces, and he did not attempt another major attack in the immediate future.

At about 2000 hours tanks moved up to the perimeter wire in front of S.1 and, using grappling hooks, pulled it away. Tanks from 5 Panzerkompanie and supporting infantry from the 2nd Machine-Gun Battalion and a Pioneer Battalion proceeded to clear up the bunkers manned by Captain Fell's 'A' Company, 2/24th Battalion. Post S1 was the first to succumb. Two panzers drove to 100-200 yards of the post, and opened fire, and, after a brief fight (in which three men were killed and four wounded), Lieutenant Walker and his men surrendered. These tanks then proceeded to attack S.2 (Major Fell), which contained the Company HQ and 7 Platoon. Getting to within 200 yards, the panzers opened fire, shredding sandbags on the parapets and blowing up sangars. On each tank were riding German infantrymen, who under cover of the tanks' fire, ran forwards with grenades. S.2 then surrendered.^[16]

Then was the turn of 9 Platoon dug in posts R.0 and R.1 – after a fight in which three were killed and four wounded, the posts surrendered. The crews of two RHA 2-pounders put up a fight, knocking out some of the panzers, but when the guns tried to turn to engage panzers moving to their flank, they exposed themselves to German machine-gunners, with the gunners either killed or wounded. http://louis1j1sheehan.usThe bunkered platoons from the neighbouring C Company from 2/24th Battalion were also attacked. Post S.5 was taken at first light on 1 May, but Posts S.4 (Corporal Deering) and S.6 (Captain Canty) held out grimly until the morning. Post S.7 (Corporal Thomson) stubbornly resisted, inflicting heavy casualties on the attacking Italians, before the attackers were able to throw in grenades.^[17] Attacks by Italian infantry, on posts S.8, S.9 and S.10 were repelled. Nevertheless 'C' Company suffered 20 men killed and wounded, and another 44 taken prisoner in the fighting in the northern sector that largely employed troops from the "Brescia" Infantry Division.

The attack in the southern sector also involved Italian troops and Lieutenant Mair's 16 Platoon from 'D' Company defending Posts R.2 and R.3 and R.4 were overrun. According to an Australian defender, "That night the slightest move would bring a flare over our position and the area would be lit like day. We passed a night of merry hell as the pounding went on."^[18] Italian infantry were then able to close in, and stick grenades were thrown into the bunkers. Nevertheless, Posts R.5 (Sergeant Poidevin), R.6 (Captain Bird) and R.7 (Corporal Jones) were taken only after stubborn resistance, and fought on until they had run out of ammunition or had stick grenades tossed into the firing pits. After they had been taken prisoner, General Rommel spoke to them"for you the war is over and I wish you good luck", recalled Corporal Jones.^[18]

The 51st Field Regiment had been constantly firing, causing an entire German battalion to go to ground and, according to Rommel, creating panic in the Italian infantry. Seven British Cruiser and five Matilda tanks also appeared in the Italian area of penetration, to engage in an inconclusive tank battle with Italian tankers.

The attack faltered when the Panzers leading the assault ran into a minefield placed by Morsehead to stop any breaches of the blue line. A Panzer officer recalled: "Two companies get off their motor lorries and extend in battle order. All sorts of light signals go up - green, white, red. The flares hiss down near our own MGs. It is already too late to take aim. Well, the attack is a failure. The little Fiat-Ansaldos go up in front with flame-throwers in order to clean up the triangle. Long streaks of flame, thick smoke, filthy stink. We provide cover until 2345 hours, then retire through the gap. It is a mad drive through the dust. At 0300 hours have snack beside tank. 24 hours shut up in the tank, with frightful cramp as a result - and thirsty!"^[19] After several tanks lost their tracks the remaining Panzers retreated.

Rommel's troops had captured fifteen posts on an arc of three-and-a-half miles of the perimeter, including its highest fort. But the Australians had largely contained this Italo-German thrust. One German POW said: "I cannot understand you Australians. In Poland, France, and Belgium, once the tanks got through the soldiers took it for granted that they were beaten. But you are like demons. The tanks break through and your infantry still keep fighting."^[20] Rommel wrote of seeing "a batch of some fifty or sixty Australian prisoners [largely from C Company of the 2/24th Battalion that had been taken prisoner by the Italians]... marched off close behind us—immensely big and powerful men, who without question represented an elite formation of the British Empire, a fact that was also evident in battle."^[20]

Nevertheless Australian losses had been considerable.The 2/24th Battalion alone had lost nearly half its strength killed, wounded or taken prisoner.^[21]

Rommel placed the blame for the failure to capture Tobruk squarely on the Italians.^{[citation needed]} However, it was the 19th and 20th Infantry Regiments of the 27th "Brescia" Division along with the 5th and 12th Bersaglieri Battalions of the 8th Bersaglieri Regiment, the 3rd Company, 32nd Combat Sappers Battalion and "Ariete" Armoured Division who after much hard fighting, had possession of most of the positions which the Australians had lost^[22] The 7th Bersaglieri Regiment soldiers bunkered along the newly captured concrete bunkers. The Australians fought hard to win back their positions. Much fierce hand-to-hand fighting took place from 1 May till the end of August 1941 when finally the weary soldiers of the 7th Bersaglieri were ordered move to Ain Gazala to rest and refit.^[23] According to an Australian soldier, "In Tobruk we became part of the 9th Division with the 28th and 16th Battalions. Each Platoon had to do two or three weeks in the Salient, which was a section of ‘no man’s land’ where the enemy had driven us back from fortifications that skirted Tobruk from sea to sea. Time up there wasn’t exactly pleasurable. We were in dugouts with interconnecting trenches about a foot or so deep (hence becoming known as the ‘rats of Tobruk’). The Germans pummelled us with trench mortar bombs and also had fixed machine guns firing on us."http://louis1j1sheehan.us

Rommel was impressed by the conduct of the Australians. The heavy losses incurred by the attackers led the commanders of the Italian divisions and the German 5th Light Division to argue against further attacks until better preparations could be made. Rommel decided to hold off further major attacks until the end of November 1941, awaiting the arrival of more German forces and allowing more training of his forces in the art of siege warfare.

Reisig Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 949499

Gerhard Herbert Richard Reisig Rocket engineer. Born 3 March 1910. Died 14 March 2005. Member of the German Rocket Team in the United States after World War II.

Personal: Male.

German expert in guided missile guidance, telemetry, and control during World War II. He was educated at the University of Dresden in engineering physics, obtaining his doctorate in 1934. He worked for Siemens from 1935- October 1937, then was hired by Von Braun to work with the rocket team at Kummersdorf as chief of measuring devices. From 1939 he became involved in development of the A3 and then A5 subscale versions of the V-2. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire He was technical liaison with Regener in development of a scientific package for sounding rocket missions by the V-2. In 1943 he joined Dornberger's staff and was involved with the Wasserfall surface-to-air missile. As of January 1947, hired by the Americans under Project Paperclip and working at Fort Bliss, Texas. Worked his entire life with the rocket team, at Fort Bliss, White Stands, and then at Huntsville. Still living in Huntsville, Alabama in 2004. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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aahmes

The federal agency planning a new $130 million courthouse in Harrisburg has spent $197,000 to sell the community on its plans.

In comparison, that agency, the U.S. General Services Administration, spent less than one-fourth as much for economic research on potential sites for the courthouse, according to records under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The spending for public relations and communications consultants is seen as a drop in the bucket in view of the overall project. But public affairs experts and local leaders wonder what the GSA got for its money.

The agency defended the spending -- which it acknowledged as out of the ordinary -- because of its poor standing within the community. The agency continues to battle local officials over the proposed courthouse site.

"They're more concerned about their public image than they are the right thing," said U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill County, who called the public relations spending a waste of money.

"It is outrageous and unacceptable that a government agency would try to win the court of public opinion by hiring consultants," he said.

"It's a courthouse, for God's sake," said Chris Kelley Cimko, a public relations expert and senior vice president of FD Dittus Communications.

"Typically, GSA, local pols and city administrations know what to say and how to say it," Cimko said, adding that it "is not exactly rocket science."

Mayor Stephen R. Reed, Holden and other local lawmakers want the new courthouse at Sixth and Reily streets to spur development in that area. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
After two attempts to build at other sites failed because of community opposition, the GSA wants to rebuild at the site of the existing Ronald Reagan Federal Building and Courthouse on Third and Walnut streets.

The GSA might have been forced to use outside help because its own communications department has been cut, Cimko said.

"They don't have people on staff that are the experts, so why not go out and hire," said Beverly Cigler, a public policy and administration professor at Penn State.

"It's fairly obvious that GSA had a big problem" coping with angry lawmakers and local officials, Cigler said.

In a statement, the GSA said it usually has good relationships in communities.

"The intensity of the Harrisburg community's response to our site proposals led us to believe that we needed additional support to communicate our objectives and rationale for decisions," the agency said. "Because of the public relations assistance, GSA has learned many things regarding the Harrisburg community and has modified the ways we provide information to the public."

The GSA has paid $197,000 to three firms: Xenophon Strategies, based in Washington, D.C.; Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm; and the Neiman Group, based in Harrisburg.

Neiman was hired as a subcontractor by Gensler, the architectural firm coordinating the project. Gensler has been paid more than $686,000.

Xenophon and Neiman have ties to former Gov. Tom Ridge and Pennsylvania Republican political circles. Neiman President Tim Reeves was Ridge's communications director. Steve Aaron, the Neiman account executive working on behalf of the GSA, worked in the Ridge administration press office.

Called about Neiman's work, Aaron referred questions to the GSA.

David Fuscus, Xenophon's founder, CEO and president, was a deputy chief of staff to Ridge and later worked for him at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Many Xenophon staffers have Ridge administration ties.

Xenophon is no longer working on the courthouse project. Burson-Marsteller, which was paid $5,000 a month as a retainer, is not currently working on the project, according to the GSA. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx

Neiman started out working for $2,500 a month, but its monthly retainer was raised to $5,000.

Hiring Neiman or another local firm made sense because of the hostile community response, Cimko said. But she questioned the need for all three firms.

In response to questions submitted in writing, the agency said the outside consultants "provided GSA with a better understanding of the Harrisburg community and provided recommendations on the best ways to communicate with various stakeholders."

"By becoming more accessible to the media and proactive in our communications, the public has received regular updates and has learned more about the project," the agency said.

Community leaders questioned the value of spending that taxpayer money. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/


They said the agency and its representatives failed to substantively engage the community and its leaders, and often ignored their opinions.

Reginald A. Guy Jr., a member of the Right Site Harrisburg Coalition, which backs the Sixth and Reily location, called the GSA's community outreach efforts inadequate.

"To my knowledge, the agency has held no evening public meetings or engaged any African-American professionals to survey African-American views," he said.

Local leaders and congressional aides said the GSA's arrogant attitude toward local opinion worsened already strained relations.

Holden said he sees why the GSA hired architectural and engineering consultants, but questioned the need for communications assistance.

"Can't they make the arguments themselves?" he said.









When Diane Kovach read the letter from Procter & Gamble, her heart sank.

"I got sick to my stomach, honestly," the Palmyra-area resident said. "I never anticipated my name being a problem with a bigger company. I never in a million years would have anticipated something like that."

The problem? Kovach started an in-home business less than two years ago, making cloth diapers and selling them online. She needed a domain name, and "Pampered Bunz" seemed appropriate.

As the business took off, she applied to trademark the name, but Procter & Gamble, maker of Pampers disposable diapers, got a whiff of it.

"We are concerned that your client's use and registration of the mark Pampered Bunz may infringe P&G's established intellectual property rights in its famous Pampers trademark," stated the April 25 letter to Kovach's lawyer. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/



P&G told Kovach to withdraw her trademark application and stop using the word "Pampered."

"I never made the connection, and until now, nobody I talked to made it, either," Kovach said. "For heaven's sake, they're reusable."

Kovach started her business when other mothers asked for the cloth diapers she made for her son in various fabrics. She said she gets up to 40 orders a month from customers who typically buy about 24 diapers -- a two-day supply -- at a time. Prices range from $13 to $19.50.

At first, Kovach said, she wanted to fight Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based personal and home products giant. But her lawyer, Norman Lehrer of Cherry Hill, N.J., told her a fight could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"Not only am I not going to do that to my family with the time it would take, but I'm a work-at-home mom," she said. "I really don't have the resources."

Kovach and her husband, a third-shift mechanic for Pepperidge Farm, have a 4-year-old daughter and a 17-month-old son.

Reusable versus disposable is not the legal issue in question, Lehrer said.

"Would the ordinary consumer be confused or deceived into believing there was some relationship between the two?" he asked. Kovach would have had to finance a survey costing anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 to prove that consumers didn't assume a link between Pampers and Pampered Bunz, Lehrer said.

Procter & Gamble's corporate communications office did not return calls for comment.

Before Kovach agrees to stop using the Pampered Bunz name, Lehrer is negotiating with P&G on issues that he would not specify. Kovach is doing some rebranding of her own, carefully researching a new name for her business.

She has recovered from her initial shock -- "overwhelmed" was her word for it -- and said she understands P&G's perspective. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx


"They're an established company," she said. "They've worked really hard for their name, and I can appreciate that, working really hard for a good name."


A poorly run Pentagon program for providing workman's compensation for civilian employees in Iraq and Afghanistan has allowed defense contractors and insurance companies to gouge American taxpayers, a House committee said Thursday.

Insurance companies alone have collected nearly $600 million in excessive profits over the past five years, says a Democratic staff report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but the Defense Department refuses to adjust its approach for managing the program.

According to the committee, the Pentagon allows its contractors to negotiate their own insurance contracts. By contrast, the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers have all selected a single insurance carrier to provide the insurance at fixed rates.

"What makes the situation even worse is the people this program is supposed to benefit — the injured employees working for contractors — have to fight the insurance companies to get their benefits," committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said at a hearing Thursday. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
"Delays and denials in paying claims are the rule."

KBR Inc., one of the largest defense contractors in Iraq, paid the insurance giant AIG $284 million for medical and disability coverage under the Defense Base Act, a reference to the federal law mandating the insurance. Due to the way KBR's contract is structured, this premium, along with an $8 million markup for KBR, gets billed to the taxpayer.

"Out of this amount, just $73 million actually goes to injured contractors, and AIG and KBR pocket over $100 million as profit," Waxman said.

In an e-mailed statement, AIG spokesman Chris Winans said the company is reviewing the staff report. But AIG is confident its coverage is accurately and fairly priced given the high risks to workers in war zones and the potential for sizable claims, Winans said.

All contractors doing work overseas for U.S. government agencies are required to insure their civilian employees, many of whom are handling dangerous jobs in hostile areas. Contractors get the coverage from private insurance companies, then they're reimbursed for what they spend. The insurance costs are included in the contract's overall price.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command has opened a probe into two companies working on Iraq reconstruction that have been accused of padding their profits by claiming reimbursements from the Corps of Engineers for insurance coverage they never purchased.

The probe of two Iraqi companies located in Tikrit — Sakar al-Fahal and al-Jubori — led the Corps of Engineers to scour its records for evidence of fraud by other contractors hired with billions of U.S. dollars to help rebuild Iraqi infrastructure devastated by the war.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked what the Corps of Engineers is doing to stop other companies from bilking the federal government for unpaid insurance coverage.

James Dalton, chief of engineering and construction for the Corps of Engineers, said contracting officers are trained to look for signs of fraud. The case involving the Iraqi companies, Dalton said, "was found through routine oversight of our contracts."

Waxman asked John Needham of the Government Accountability Office if U.S. taxpayers were getting the most for their money.

"It's not apparent they are," answered Needham, who added that the Defense Department has been unable to collect data on how much is spent on insurance for defense contracts. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx


Richard Ginman, a senior Pentagon acquisition official, said the Army Corps of Engineers' approach stems from a pilot program the Defense Department began in 2003 after contractors doing business in Iraq complained about the high cost of the mandatory coverage.

Rates for the Defense Base Act insurance had ballooned from $4 per $100 of employee salary to a ratio of $20 per $100 of compensation. It was especially tough for small companies to get the mandatory insurance, Ginman said.

Through the pilot program, Chicago-based Continental Insurance Company offered companies with Corps of Engineers contracts at lower fixed rates. A company with a construction contract, for example, would pay $7.25 for every $100 of payroll.

The Pentagon is still studying that program's results to determine if it makes sense to require all military branches and agencies to use it, Ginman said.

Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said the pilot effort has already saved $19 million and he criticized the Defense Department for moving too slowly to make needed changes.

"The foot dragging seems to be contagious," Cooper said.

But Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the committee's top Republican, said using a single insurance company may not be possible for the Defense Department. The military's obligations under the Defense Base Act, he said, dwarf those of other federal agencies. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/

"It's not clear that any insurance provider would be willing to underwrite (Defense Base Act) insurance for all DOD contractors, or that contractors would be willing to participate on those terms," Davis said.





The most surprising thing about Sue Simmons’s unbleeped blooper the other night is that anyone in this city even noticed.

You may have read about her unfortunate slip. Ms. Simmons, a news anchor on WNBC-TV, tried to get the attention of her longtime partner, Chuck Scarborough, by asking him, “What are you doing?”

Only she did not realize that they were live on the air. And she didn’t quite say “What are you doing?” She inserted two words between “what” and “are.” One of those words was “the.” Sorry to be coy about the other one, but it is not allowed to be printed here. Rules are rules. If you can’t figure out what it is, you have not been in New York very long — like less than four minutes.

Despite a certain amount of twitter over this incident, it seems that both the republic and Ms. Simmons will survive. “She’ll continue to be on the air,” said a WNBC spokeswoman, Susan Kiel.

The reality is that this vulgar word has been tossed about with such abandon in public for so many years that New Yorkers tend to tune it out. Its endless, and mindless, repetition left them numb long ago. By now, the word is no longer shocking, just tedious.

Through frequent use, “a word like this begins to be less of a curse word,” said Ricardo Otheguy, a sociolinguist at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “The more you use it, the less dirty it is.”

Then, too, he said, the city has so many people for whom English is a second language. The word may sound softer to them than it is. “Swearing in your own language feels like a really dirty thing to do,” Professor Otheguy said. “Swearing in somebody else’s language seems somehow less fraught.”

Add to that the fact that boundaries between public space and private are being erased. Cellphones contribute mightily to that, said another sociolinguist, John V. Singler of New York University. “The range of places where it’s O.K. to use that word has grown enormously,” Professor Singler said. By now, he said, “the real taboo words — and even these depend on who’s saying them — have to do much more with race.”

You routinely hear Wall Street suits use the word at high decibels in the subway. Police officers bounce it casually among one another, no matter who else is around to hear. Teenagers use it all the time. Some people walk around with the word screaming from their T-shirts — an insight, perhaps, into their capacity for self-degradation.

Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the word on the Senate floor, suggesting to Senator Patrick Leahy that he commit an impossible sexual act. Eliot Spitzer, the swaggering former governor, tried to be macho by using it to emphasize his self-image as a “steamroller.” http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx


Rarely do any of these people display a glimmer of the creativity shown by a fellow soldier in my Army days. The jeep he was driving broke down. Looking under the hood, he needed only four words to pronounce the vehicle beyond repair. The first was “the,” followed by the Simmons-Cheney-Spitzer word in its adjectival, noun and verb forms — in that order. It bordered on poetry.

There was nothing poetic this week in the repeated use of the word after the rapper Remy Ma was sentenced in Manhattan to eight years in prison for shooting a woman. Remy Ma’s boyfriend, a fellow performer with the nom de rap of Papoose, was outraged. Maybe he did not fully grasp that it is generally considered unacceptable to shoot people.

When told by court officers to vamoose, Papoose lost control. All along the courthouse corridors, he repeated that tiresome word. T. S. Eliot he wasn’t.

Some New Yorkers, though, are still capable of cringing. A shouting match between two taxi drivers — neither a native English speaker but both graced with a solid command of the familiar word — cost one of them dearly. As reported this week in The New York Post, he was deemed the aggressor, and fined $1,000 and suspended for 30 days by Matthew W. Daus, chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Sure, driving a cab is stressful, Mr. Daus said, but decorum must be maintained, especially in a service industry that caters to tourists from places where that word may not be batted around casually. “Drivers are often the first and last face that visitors to our city see,” he said.

Official censure does only so much, though. No power could have prevented a loud argument some years ago between two street guys. Finally, one of them shouted at the other, “I’ve only got two words to say to you.”

Actually, he then said four words. Two of them were sandwiched between “shut” and “up.” You can easily guess what they were. The point is that this man truly thought he was using only two words. That’s a New Yorker.


Among the celluloid dream girls manufactured by Hollywood in the 1940s, Jennifer Jones occupies a celestial niche. Beginning with her first major feature, “The Song of Bernadette,” in which she played a saintly French peasant who has a vision of the Virgin Mary, the character she represented on the screen was a spiritually exalted being who kept part of herself in reserve. Even when Ms. Jones went notoriously down and dirty to play Pearl Chavez, a sex-crazed half-Indian woman in “Duel in the Sun,” right, you had the titillating sense of a lady playing a tramp. (The opposite could be said of Lana Turner in dignified upscale roles.) http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx



These polarities are suggested by the title of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of Ms. Jones’s movies, “Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer Jones,” at the Walter Reade Theater. Even as she crawled through the dirt, you still had a sense of her as the abstract embodiment of ideal femininity, 1940s style: a beautiful, empathetic trophy who was fundamentally untouchable.

Her aura of exaltation is largely thanks to David O. Selznick, the producer who discovered her, fell in love with her and eventually married her; for most of her career he micromanaged every detail of her presentation. He liked to cast her as women from great literature: the title character of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”; Carrie Meeber in “Sister Carrie”; Catherine Barkley in the disastrous 1957 remake of “A Farewell to Arms” (not shown in the series); and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”

The retrospective begins on Friday afternoon with the 1952 melodrama “Ruby Gentry,” set in Southern bayou country, followed by the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy, “Cluny Brown,” in which she played opposite Charles Boyer, and “Duel in the Sun,” Selznick’s pulpy attempt in 1946 to duplicate the success of “Gone With the Wind.”

But the most blatant attempt to present Ms. Jones as the essence of female perfection is “Portrait of Jennie,” a romantic 1948 ghost story in which her dead character, Jennie Appleton, materializes from the past to inspire a starving artist (Joseph Cotten) who feels compelled to paint her. Jennie is the face in the misty light.


Poor old Pythagoras is slipping away from us. He was always a shadowy figure in Western thought -- his followers were secretive and he himself wrote nothing, as far as we know. Even in his own time and place, the Greek cities of southern Italy in the seventh century B.C., Pythagoras was a kind of myth-magnet. Over time a large body of thought about him developed, though it was based on precious little evidence. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, Pythagoras became yet more mysterious.

In 1962, the Swiss scholar Walter Burkert -- using a close reading of earliest written accounts of what Pythagoras was supposed to have said to his followers -- published a monumental debunking of the Pythagorean tradition. Fellow scholars were persuaded that what little they thought they knew about Pythagoras was probably wrong.

Until then, it had been said that there were two sides to Pythagoras -- which is a little ironic, given his presumed association with triangles. He had a religious side as the miracle-working leader of a cult that believed in the transmigration of souls (that "the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird," as Shakespeare's Malvolio puts it in "Twelfth Night"). And Pythagoras had a "scientific" side: He was a pioneering mathematician and philosopher who regarded geometry and numbers as the keys to the universe's harmonious structure.

Only the first side emerged intact from Burkert's scrutiny. The picture of Pythagoras as a mathematician and philosopher was a "mistake," Burkert said, an error resulting largely from the eagerness of self-styled "Pythagoreans" in later centuries to attribute their work to the master himself.

It now seems that Pythagoras did not invent the notion of mathematical proof after all. (Bertrand Russell and Arthur Koestler thought he did, which is why they both proclaimed him the West's most influential thinker.) http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/

Nor did he discover the theorem that bears his name -- that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It was known a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia. He may have noted a link between some harmonic intervals in the music of his time and certain simple numerical ratios. But there is no reason to think he was the first to do so.

Still, even if the old Greek magician himself did not have much to do with it, Pythagoreanism played a sometimes important role in Western science before Newton, especially in astronomy, as Kitty Ferguson illustrates in "The Music of Pythagoras," an engaging survey of the ideas that have been thought of as Pythagorean.

For example, Plato's "Timaeus," with its account of a creator fashioning the world out of basic geometrical shapes, reflected the ideas of Plato's friend Archytas of Tarentum, a mathematician who regarded himself as a Pythagorean. "Timaeus" was the basis for most cosmology in the West for the first 12 centuries of the Christian era.

In the early 17th century, the astronomy of Johannes Kepler was suffused with Pythagorean themes, including the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." In ancient times it was much discussed why this sound, allegedly made by the heavenly bodies as they whiz through space, cannot be heard by human ears. Aristotle wryly noted that humans cannot hear it because there is no such sound.

In general, Ms. Ferguson's theme is that Pythagoras himself is responsible for the notion that numbers reveal hidden patterns in nature and that this notion amounts to a fundamental principle in science. It is indeed likely that Pythagoras regarded simple numbers and ratios as the keys to the universe; this much survives the skeptical thrust of recent scholarship about him.

Ms. Ferguson is familiar with the scholarship, but it is not clear that she has grasped its significance. Pythagoras' interest in numbers was primarily mystical, with little scientific content. He was concerned more with numerological symbolism (four was justice, for example, and five was marriage) than with measuring things. And the hope that it is possible to provide a unified account of the universe, using quantitative tools, is fundamentally Greek rather than specifically Pythagorean. The idea is found, in crude forms, in Pythagoras' immediate predecessors, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/

Ms. Ferguson closes her book with a hurried meditation on the threats to the conception of an orderly universe that are allegedly posed by 20th-century math and science. Were the Pythagoreans -- or, we might as well say, the Greeks -- correct to assume that there are comprehensible patterns in the universe? Or has that turned out to be a false hope? Ms. Ferguson skips briskly through quantum mechanics, chaos theory, set theory and more, wondering whether they show, in their sometimes surprising and always complex claims, that the universe is not rational after all.

But each of these fields has added to our rational understanding of the world and has done so by means of mathematics. The universe may not be as simple as some early Greek mathematicians imagined it to be, but it is proving ever more comprehensible by the day.


We have all felt it -- the anxiety that comes when we walk (or are wheeled) through a hospital's doors or bring a relative to the emergency room. We all have our stories and gripes about a health-care system that may rank with the nation's air-travel industry as the greatest source of public complaint in America. And like it or not, each of us holds a stake in the current debate over how to improve the way we care for the sick in this country.

So it would seem a fine time to burrow into the inner workings of an American hospital, which is what Julie Salamon has done in "Hospital." Ms. Salamon, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, negotiated for no-strings-attached, year-long access to Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. As the book's subtitle suggests -- "Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids" -- there's an awful lot going on there.

The hospital she chose is at once state-of-the-art and unwieldy, riven by feuds and inefficiency, a place that employs 5,700 people and admits more than 40,000 patients in a single year. It is, as Ms. Salamon puts it, "a demilitarized zone, where patients dragged in not just their wounds, fevers, and malfunctions, but their accents and customs, their immigration and insurance problems, their feelings about being outsiders." http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx




Those "accents and customs" are among the hospital's most distinguishing features. Founded a century ago to serve an Orthodox Jewish community, Maimonides now treats Haitians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Mexicans and many more nationalities. All told, Ms. Salamon reports, an astonishing 67 languages are heard (if not always understood) at the hospital. It must rank among the most polyglot patient populations anywhere. Says one first-year resident: "If you can get the translator down to the ER fast enough to figure out what the heck is going on, you can actually save a lot of lives here."

Ms. Salamon had carte blanche to examine the place, "warts and all." And warts there are. Budgetary concerns hang over nearly everything that happens at Maimonides -- not a surprise, really, but it still jars to hear the hospital president bemoan the "f---ing surgery numbers," because those numbers are too low and hurting revenues. Cancer is seen as a "growth industry," the overburdened emergency room "a pot of gold." Patients must be discharged and newcomers admitted as expeditiously as possible -- again, an understandable desire, but a hospital vice president uses the unfortunate phrase "dead bed time." Ms. Salamon reports more serious problems: Blood donated specifically for one patient is mistakenly given to another, and we learn that -- even after recent improvements -- 20% of Maimonides' physicians still fail to practice "hand hygiene" -- i.e., wash their hands -- as often as they should.

Colorful characters abound. The emergency-room resident David Gregorius, Nebraska-raised, appears bewildered and overwhelmed at times but ever ready to improvise, going without food on intense shifts, picking up fragments of Mandarin and Russian to help understand his patients. As the end of his residency nears, Dr. Gregorius is a transformed, confident physician: "After I've dealt with Maimonides for a year, if you cut me loose in a little ER in Western Nebraska by myself, I'd be competent, actually."

A cancer patient called "Mr. Zen" (Ms. Salamon alters patients' names) spends his last eight months of life at Maimonides, stoic to the end, his care costing the hospital a million dollars in bills that are likely to go unpaid. The president and chief executive of Maimonides, Pam Brier, comes off as egotistical but also passionate about her work and tireless in her advocacy for the hospital -- so much so that when she learns that the Brooklyn borough president has been admitted with heart trouble, she tells the hospital board: "Who knows, that may be another advertisement." http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
The main character, as it were, is the hospital itself, where there is a constant struggle to care effectively for patients, lure top-flight physicians and coax reimbursements from insurance companies. The associate director of medical oncology voices a common lament: "All the things that are really good -- diabetes care, asthma care, taking good care of cancer patients -- you don't get paid for that . . . you get paid for radiating people, doing complicated surgery, giving them chemotherapy."

At Maimonides, "Hospital" will undoubtedly be a must-read, and the book will be of obvious interest to health-care professionals -- though some of Maimonides' problems are probably so well known to them, and others so peculiar to this one hospital, that they may prove less worthy of study. As for the rest of us, I am not so sure.

Ms. Salamon tells us many times that Maimonides is complex and chaotic and that it even has a "soul." But for long patches of her book, the narrative is dry and "soul" is absent from the page. In this respect "Hospital" disappoints. It would have been a great help had Ms. Salamon told us more about the patients admitted during her time there; apart from a wrenching chapter called "A Good Death," there are few stories about the patients themselves. "Hospital" is largely a book about physicians and administrators. While Ms. Salamon's immersive, you-are-there reporting brings the reader into offices and meetings, it might have been more compelling if she had reported more stories from the ER or OR. As it is, we hear ample discussion of how to revamp the emergency room, but we learn little about what patients actually experience there.

Still, "Hospital" is a solid piece of reportage. In the end, you come to admire the book's principal figures, as Ms. Salamon does, however flawed they might be. The physicians and administrators, she makes clear, "tried to remember -- against the odds posed by a greedy and corrupted health-care system and by institutional and human frailty -- that healing was the heart of the matter."

Mr. Nagorski, a senior producer at ABC News, is the author of "Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack."


Should a leader strive to be loved or feared? This question, famously posed by Machiavelli, lies at the heart of Joseph Nye's new book. Mr Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and one-time chairman of America's National Intelligence Council, is best known for promoting the idea of “soft power”, based on persuasion and influence, as a counterpoint to “hard power”, based on coercion and force.

Having analysed the use of soft and hard power in politics and diplomacy in his previous books, he has now turned his attention to the relationship between power and leadership, in both the political and business spheres. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/

Machiavelli, he notes, concluded that “one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved.” In short, hard power is preferable to soft power. But modern leadership theorists have come to the opposite conclusion.

The context of leadership is changing, they observe, and the historical emphasis on hard power is becoming outdated. In modern companies and democracies, power is increasingly diffused and traditional hierarchies are being undermined, making soft power ever more important. But that does not mean coercion should now take a back seat to persuasion, Mr Nye argues. Instead, he advocates a synthesis of these two views. The conclusion of “The Powers to Lead”, his survey of the theory of leadership, is that a combination of hard and soft power, which he calls “smart power”, is the best approach.

The dominant theoretical model of leadership at the moment is, apparently, the “neocharismatic and transformational leadership paradigm”. Anyone allergic to management jargon will already be running for the exit, but Mr Nye has performed a valuable service in rounding up and summarising the various academic studies and theories of leadership into a single, slim volume. He examines different approaches to leadership, the morality of leadership and how the wider context can determine the effectiveness of a particular leader. There are plenty of anecdotes and examples, both historical and contemporary, political and corporate.

Alas, leadership is a slippery subject, and as he rehearses the pros and cons of various theories, even Mr Nye never quite nails the jelly to the wall. He is at his most interesting when discussing the moral aspects of leadership—in particular, the question of whether it is sometimes necessary for good leaders to lie—and he provides a helpful 12-point summary of his conclusions. A recurring theme is that as circumstances change, different sorts of leaders are required; a leader who thrives in one environment may struggle in another, and vice versa. Ultimately that is just a fancy way of saying that leadership offers no easy answers. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx



In 1964 NBC's “Today” show suddenly needed a new girl. The programme always had a glamorous “girl” to handle the weather and lighter stories, but the previous one was addicted to prescription drugs and the one before her had a drink problem. “Why not Barbara?” asked Hugh Downs, the show's host, referring to Barbara Walters, the programme's lone female writer. She wasn't beautiful or well known, but she knew the ropes and would “work cheap”.

“Well, like the ingénue in a corny movie, there I was: the patient and long overlooked understudy,” writes Ms Walters in her candid new memoir, “Audition”. Having toiled in the shadows for years, writing scripts and making coffee, she finally got her big on-air break. Don Hewitt, a TV producer, had assured her she would never make it because she had the wrong looks and couldn't pronounce her “r”s properly. Ms Walters duly avoided sentences with a lot of “r”s in them.

NBC's 13-week contract turned into 13 years at “Today” and nearly half a century in front of the camera, breaking gender barriers and securing interviews when other journalists were turned down. Her genial, empathetic style won fans and friends. “Barbara, are you hungry?” Fidel Castro asked after a marathon interview in Cuba before whipping up a sandwich. Anwar Sadat's grieving widow admitted, “you were the only one I was ever jealous of because Anwar liked you so much.” Ms Walters earned a reputation for finding something soft in her subjects. “Asking the right questions has always been less important than listening to the answers,” she explains.

She helped support her family (her father was an unlucky nightclub impresario), and she remains haunted by her impatience with her disabled sister. Her insecurities—some of them financial—pushed her to work harder. “Make no mistake: television is a demanding business...it is hell on your social and romantic life,” she writes. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx

Indeed, Ms Walters's entertaining tome, which picks up considerably after the first 75 pages, describes three failed marriages, many complicated love affairs (including with Alan Greenspan and Edward W. Brooke, a senator) and a tough stretch with her adopted daughter. But the author seems reconciled with her many memories, and proud of her stories. It is for good reason that she now owns a ring inscribed with the words, “I did that already”.








Mortgage craters, ropy disclosure, bloated costs, a newish boss desperately trying to stop the haemorrhaging amid calls for radical surgery, even a break-up. Citigroup? Aptly though this describes America's biggest bank, it could just as easily apply to its biggest insurer, American International Group (AIG).

AIG's place in the credit crunch's hall of shame is now assured thanks to its record $7.8 billion loss in the latest quarter, bringing the red ink over the past six months to $13 billion. The main culprit is its book of credit-default swaps, much of it tied to subprime mortgages, which has been written down by $20 billion. A chastened AIG has joined the rush for fresh capital.

Disgruntled shareholders have a flag-waver in Hank Greenberg, who ran AIG imperiously for 37 years before being booted out in 2005 amid an accounting probe. Still the biggest individual shareholder, the 83-year-old lashed out at his former fief this week, averring that it had suffered a “complete loss of credibility”.

There is restiveness within, too. Executives at International Lease Finance Corporation, the world's biggest buyer of commercial aircraft and part of AIG since 1990, are reportedly agitating for a spin-off. They worry that AIG's woes will drag down ILFC: its credit rating was cut along with its parent's following the latest loss.

Such huffing is a trifle disingenuous. ILFC has benefited from being under AIG's wing, for instance amid the turmoil for aviation after September 11th 2001. And most of the dodgy default swaps were written on Mr Greenberg's watch—indeed, AIG stopped selling them at the end of 2005, a few months after he had been replaced by Martin Sullivan, a former protégé.

But AIG has played its hand badly. It insisted until this year that it had $15 billion-20 billion of excess capital and that actual (as opposed to mark-to-market) losses were unlikely. It has since retreated from that position and modified its internal models (ie, made them less optimistic). But uncertainty still abounds. AIG estimates its ultimate derivatives losses will be up to $2.4 billion. Unnervingly, an independent assessor hired by AIG puts the potential cost as high as $11 billion. AIG thinks much of the current damage will be reversed, thanks to the vagaries of fair-value accounting. But why trust its judgment rather than the market's? And any such gains won't come at least until 2009, says Thomas Cholnoky of Goldman Sachs.

Softening insurance markets may compound AIG's woes. With pricing power ebbing and catastrophe pay-outs set to rise after an unusually calm couple of years, America's property and casualty industry—dominated by AIG and Berkshire Hathaway—seems to be entering another of its periodic downturns (see chart). Premium rates in casualty will fall by 10-15% this year, predicts Lockton, a broker.

With the bull run in stocks over, life insurance and annuities could suffer, too. And insurers face lower returns on investments in alternative assets, such as hedge funds and private equity. “Yellow lights are blinking all over the industry,” says Donald Light of Celent, a consultancy. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx

All of which means AIG faces a double whammy of credit-market missteps and a deteriorating core business. Time is not on the affable Mr Sullivan's side. At the annual meeting this week, the directors reiterated their support for him, though some have privately begun to express doubts. Who said insurance was dull?



EVERY ecosystem has a cast of characters playing similar roles. The bison, moose and elk of North America do much the same thing as antelope and wildebeest do on the African savannah. Jackals and hyenas are the scavengers of the land whereas vultures are the undisputed scavengers of the air. The same is even true of carnivores. Crocodiles, cheetahs, great white sharks and peregrine falcons all come at their prey with great speed, using a combination of momentum and strength to stun and kill. Now research has put up a surprising candidate to join this high-speed predatory club: the short-finned pilot whale.

Whales, like all mammals, have lungs and must rise to the surface once in a while to breathe. The problem for many whale species is that their sources of food are usually at depth, forcing them to hold their breath as they descend to feed. Researchers have long assumed that deep-diving whales conserve their oxygen supply by moving slowly, not more than 2 metres per second, during their long descents. But that is not the way of the short-finned pilot whale.

Natacha Aguilar of La Laguna University on the Spanish Canary Islands and her colleagues fitted special suction-cupped electronic tags to 23 short-finned pilot whales near Tenerife. The tags were designed by Mark Johnson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to record whale sounds while monitoring both their depth and position. The aim of the study, which will appear in a forthcoming edition of Animal Ecology, was to understand the foraging strategies that the whales used in deep-water.

The tags revealed that the maximum depth and time of the whales' dives was 1,018 metres and 21 minutes, which was in line with expectations. However, during most dives below 540 metres during the day, the whales broke into a sprint of up to 9 metres per second, which in deep water is the cetacean equivalent of a world record. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/


During these sprints the tags also picked up sonar buzzes and clicks from the whales which are known to be associated with the capture of prey. So the whales were chasing something at high speed, like a cheetah would on land. The researchers are not sure what is being hunted, but they suspect that it is large and worth the exertion in terms of the number of calories it could provide. One possibility is that the prey are giant squid: a chase of Titanic proportions.








In this remote corner of the former Soviet Union, life has shrunk to the size of the basics: tomatoes; corn; apricot trees; baby goats.

That is what grows in the garden of Toktokan Tileberdaeva, a mother of six who has lived almost 40 years in this small village in Kyrgyzstan, a claw-shaped country covered in mountains that once formed part of the Soviet Union’s long border with China.

Like a settler on the frontier, she lives off the land, hauling water from a turquoise-colored river and washing her clothes in the same bucket she washes her grandchildren. Her pension, $33 a month, is enough to buy one giant sack of flour — bread for the month.

Life was not always like this. Before Communism fell and Kyrgyzstan became its own country, Ms. Tileberdaeva had a job in a toothbrush factory. Her husband, now deceased, worked building giant hydroelectric plants, and a bus came to take their children to school.

But after 1991 the factory closed, all public services stopped and an economic collapse tore painful holes in the lives of families here, turning them into immigrants in their own country. Their skills were no longer needed. Their past was a mistake. Louis J. Sheehan Esquire





“I really miss the Soviet Union,” she said, standing in a small blue trailer where she and her children sleep on soft rugs. “We lived well. I worked. I earned a salary.”

The Soviet Union collapsed almost 17 years ago, but for many on the outer edges of the empire it feels like yesterday. They enjoy reminiscing about the time when they were young and their factories were working full steam. Now the toothbrush factory stands empty with blank windows, a painful reminder of their lost past.

Change is coming. Engineers from China, Turkey and Iran, though not from Russia, have rebuilt the long ribbon of road that cuts through the mountains to connect the south of the country to the north. Ms. Tileberdaeva’s younger children are taught in Kyrgyz, not Russian. Goods and trade have begun to flow from China in the east, instead of from Russia in the west.

But none of that is any consolation to Ms. Tileberdaeva, who spends every waking hour scratching a living out of her land.

Sometimes her oldest daughter, a cafeteria worker in Bishkek, the country’s capital, sends her money. The rest comes from her goats and her garden.

Her life is solitary. She is content with the company of her children and grandchildren, and says she does not seek other adults for support or friendship.

Most people in this small town are drunks, she said. Chinese merchants, sullenly despised for their wealth and success, provide fleeting entertainment: Locals throw rocks at them when they drive by.

The past is not always something she wants to remember. Her husband stole her when she was 19, as she walked home from class at a technical college, a local custom that she feels is heartlessly unfair. She cried, kicking and screaming, as they reached his home. She tried — and failed — three times to escape.

“I wanted to die,” she said looking at the remains of the first house she was brought to, also on the property, but now a grassy playground with walls but no roof.

Family life improved, but only a little. Her husband was a drinker, and was mean when drunk, sometimes throwing her and the children out of the house in a rage. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/

He died in 2003 (the Soviet military sent him to clean up Chernobyl, and he was never quite the same when he returned), but she grimaced when asked if she had married again.

“If I had had a second one, he would have been the same,” she said.

Her current concern is a roof, not a man. On a snowy night in December, a pan on her small wood stove caught fire during dinner, setting the roof on fire. She fled through a window with the children, wading out into the snow in pajamas and running for help.

The winter was unusually snowy, but there was no money for a roof, so she and her family crammed into a donated trailer, a single dark room coated in quilts.

Things could be worse. Kyrgyzstan is relatively liberal compared with its authoritarian neighbors, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. A clean river flows through her backyard, and the soil is rich. Her goats recently had a litter. Their soft babies wobbled in spring grass.

She asked about America, as water for laundry heated on a hotplate. Did everyone live in a high-rise building? Was everyone rich? She watched as her small grandson, wearing a cast-off New York Yankees hat, teetered in, holding a tiny yellow flower.

“Our garden is free,” she said smiling. “The earth is good. That’s how I live.”

Then she invited visitors to tear pieces from a round, coarse loaf of bread. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/





Volunteers with the Capital Area Chris tian Church in Hamp den Twp. have been busy this week constructing the Adventure Zone Playground, the first playground of its kind on the West Shore and only the second in the Harrisburg area.

Don Hamilton, senior pastor at the church on Lamb's Gap Road, said volunteers have worked until after sundown each day. Hamilton said about 1,200 volunteers have participated.

"You don't have to be skilled. Anyone can work on this playground," Hamilton said of the community project.

Building stops Sunday, Hamilton said.

"This has been a very, very exciting week for us," Hamilton said.

"We've been planning this playground for a little over a year now, and it's coming to fruition."

Hamilton said the completed Adventure Zone Playground will be part of Adventure Park, a fully accessible 53-acre recreation area for children of all ages and abilities.

When complete, Adventure Park will include public rest rooms, parking and a pavilion for picnics.

"So any kid can play on this playground, and it's just going to be a beautiful, beautiful playground," Hamilton said.

Local nonprofits, organizations and people have provided $370,000, but Hamilton said $120,000 is still needed for special rubber flooring to make the playground entirely accessible.

The only other local all-accessible park is Possibility Place in Lower Paxton Twp., in the new George Park at Nyes Road and Heatherfield Way.

U.S. spent $197,000 to sell plan
GSA faced community resistance to sites




The highly publicized releases of "UFO files" from France and Britain provide more puzzling tales about anomalous aerial objects over the years. But the stories behind some of the most spectacular sightings in UFO history will come to light only when the Russian Ministry of Defense opens up its files. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/





Consider one of the most sensational UFO stories in Soviet history — a story that has been enshrined in world "ufology" as a classic that cannot be explained in any prosaic terms.

The tale of the Minsk UFO sighting can teach a lesson about the vigor of unidentified flying objects as a cultural phenomenon.

A passenger jet is flying north on Sept. 7, 1984, near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Suddenly, at 4:10 a.m., the flight crew notices a glowing object out their forward right window. In the 10 minutes that follow, the object changes shape, zooms in on the aircraft, plays searchlights on the ground beneath it, and envelops the airliner in a mysterious ray of light that fatally injures one of the pilots. Other aircraft in the area, alerted by air traffic control operators who are watching the UFO on radar, also see it.

The incident figures prominently in "UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union," a 1992 book by Jacques Vallee, who was the real-life inspiration for the fictional ufologist in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

“No natural explanation [is] possible, given the evidence,” Vallee wrote.

A leading Russian UFO expert, Vladimir Azhazha, reported that as a result of the encounter the co-pilot “had a serious mental derangement — the encephalogram of his brain was not of an ‘earthly’ character, as he lost memory for long periods of time.”

This combination of perceptions from multiple witnesses and sensors, together with the serious physiological effects, makes for a dramatic event that on the face of it defies any earthly explanation. It was just as amazing that the official Soviet news media, long averse to discussing UFO subjects, disclosed the story in the first place. So it was no mystery that over the years that followed, the story was never actually checked out. It was only retold again and again. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/

However much we are comfortable in entrusting our lives to airline pilots, a blind trust in their abilities as trained observers of aerial phenomena is sometimes a stretch. For a number of excellent and honorable reasons, pilots have often been known to overinterpret unusual visual phenomena, particularly when it comes to underestimating the distance from what look like other aircraft.

Think of it this way: You want the person at the front of the plane to be hair-trigger alert for visual cues to potential collisions, so avoidance maneuvers can be performed in time. The worst-case interpretation of perceptions is actually a plus.

So it’s no surprise that pilots have sent their planes into a dive to duck under a fireball meteor that was really 50 miles away, or have dodged a flaming falling satellite passing 60 miles overhead. Even celestial objects are misperceived by pilots more frequently than by any other category of witness, UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek concluded 30 years ago. Since the outcome of a false-negative assessment (that is, being closer than assumed) could be death, and the cost of a false positive (being much farther away) is mere embarrassment, the bias of these reactions makes perfect sense.

Was there anything else in the sky that morning that the Soviet pilots might have seen? This wasn’t an easy question, since the Moscow press reports neglected to give the exact date of the event, but I could figure it out by checking Aeroflot airline schedules.

It turned out that early risers in Sweden and Finland had also seen an astonishing apparition in the sky that morning. According to reports collected by Claus Svahn of UFO-Sweden, people called in accounts of seeing "a very strong globe of light," sometimes "with a skirt under it." The light's glow was reflected off the ground and lasted for several minutes. In Finland, a UFO research club's annual report later cataloged 15 similar sightings from that country.

The immediate disconnect that I found was that the Scandinavian witnesses were not looking southeast, toward Minsk and the nearby airliner with its terrified crew. Nor were they looking eastward, toward the top-secret Russian space base at Plesetsk, where launchings sparked UFO reports starting in the mid-1960s. They were looking to the northeast, across Karelia and perhaps farther. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/


The direction of the apparition being seen simultaneously near Minsk provided another "look angle." If the vectors of the eyewitnesses are plotted on a map, they tend to converge out over the Barents Sea, far from land. This made the triggering mechanism for the sightings — assuming they were all of the same phenomenon — even more extraordinary.

Whatever the stimulus behind the 1984 Minsk airliner story turned out to be, I already knew that many famous Soviet UFO reports were connected with secret military aerospace activities that were misperceived by ordinary citizens. I’ve posted several decades of such research results on my Web site.

In 1967, waves of UFO reports from southern Russia and a temporary period of official permission for public discussion created a "perfect storm" of Soviet UFO enthusiasm. But it was short-lived — the topic was soon forbidden again, possibly because the government realized that what was being seen and publicized was actually a series of top-secret space-to-ground nuclear warhead tests, a weapon Moscow had just signed an international space treaty to outlaw.

Once the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (south of Arkhangelsk) began launching satellites in 1966, skywatchers throughout the northwestern Soviet Union began seeing vast glowing clouds and lights moving through the skies. These were officially non-existent rocket launchings. "Not ours!” the officials seemed to be saying. "Must be Martians."

Other space events that sparked UFO reports included orbital rocket firings timed to occur while in direct radio contact with the main Soviet tracking site in the Crimea. Such firings and the subsequent expanding clouds of jettisoned surplus fuel weren't confined to Soviet airspace. One particular category of Soviet communications satellites performed the maneuver over the Andes Mountains, subjecting the southern tip of South America to UFO panics every year or two for decades.

As the Soviet Union lurched toward collapse in the 1980s, its rigid control over the press decayed. This allowed local newspapers, especially in the area of the Plesetsk space base, to begin publishing eyewitness accounts of correctly identified rocket launchings. The newspapers sometimes printed detailed drawings of the shifting shapes of the light show caused by the sequence of rocket stage firings and equipment ejections.


Still, I wasn't willing to wave off the elaborate extra dimensions of the Minsk UFO case as mere misperception and exaggerated coincidences. Even though none of the most exciting stories, such as one pilot's death half a year later from cancer, could ever be traced to any original firsthand sources, they made for a compelling narrative. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/

Fortunately, the Soviet collapse provided the opening for the collapse of the UFO story. The May-June 1991 issue of the magazine Science in the USSR contained an article that reprised the story with one stunning addendum from the co-pilot’s flight log. He had sketched the apparition, minute by minute, as it changed shape out his side of the cockpit window, and 14 of the drawings were published for the first (and as far as I can tell, only) time.

The graphic sequence of bright light, rays, expanding halos, misty cloudiness, tadpole tail and sudden linear streamers may have looked bizarre to the magazine’s readers. But they looked very familiar to me.

I dug out the clippings from Arkhangelsk newspapers that had been mailed to me by an associate there. I looked up the other articles from recent Moscow science magazines that showed how beautiful these rocket launches looked. I also found the set of sketches made by a witness in Sweden of what was immediately recognized as a rocket launch. I laid the separate sketches out on a table.

They all clearly showed the same sequence of shape-shifting visions, as viewed from different angles to the rear of the object’s flight. The more recent accounts were of nighttime missile launches — and the impression was overwhelming that the Minsk UFO, as drawn in real time by one of the primary witnesses, looked and changed just like them.

Without the detailed minute-by-minute drawings, any claim for solving the case would have been tentative, and circumstantial at best. Even now, the case isn't quite closed. Until the Russians release the records for the test launch of a submarine-based missile — as we now know often happened from that region of the ocean, but without official acknowledgement — the answer to the mystery will remain technically unproven.

But the answer is strong enough to remind us of wider principles of investigating — and evaluating — similar stories from around the world: There are more potential prosaic stimuli out there than we usually expect. Precise times and locations and viewing directions are critical to an investigation. The temptation to fall into excitable overinterpretation is almost irresistible. Myriads of weird but meaningless coincidences can be combined to embellish a good story. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/



The most important factors for cutting through the misperceptions would be having the good fortune to come across enough original evidence, and having enough time to make sense of that evidence. That’s one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the Minsk UFO case: As long as those factors are in short supply, it’s no mystery why there are so many amazing UFO stories — and so many enthusiasts willing to endorse them.



Erich Honecker,( 1912 – May 29, 1994) was a German Communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until 1989.

After German re-unification, he first fled to the Soviet Union but was extradited by the new Russian government to Germany, where he was imprisoned and tried for high treason and crimes committed during the Cold War. However, as he was dying of cancer, he was released from prison. He died in exile in Chile about a year and a half later.

Honecker was born on Max-Braun-Straße in Neunkirchen, now Saarland, as the son of a politically militant coal miner, Wilhelm, who in 1905 had married Caroline Catharina Weidenhof. There were six children born to the family: Katharina (Käthe), Wilhelm (Willi, Hungary), Frieda, Erich, Gertrud (b. 1917; m. Hoppstädter), and Karl-Robert.

He joined the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD), the youth section of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in 1926 and joined the KPD itself in 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 he worked as a roofer, but did not finish his apprenticeship. Thereafter he was sent to Moscow to study at the International Lenin School and for the rest of his life remained a full-time politician.

He returned to Germany in 1931 and was arrested in 1935, two years after the Nazis had come to power. In 1937, he was sentenced to ten years for Communist activities and remained a prisoner until the end of World War II. At the end of the war, Honecker resumed activity in the party under leader Walter Ulbricht, and, in 1946, became one of the first members of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), which was formed by the merger of the KPD and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Following the SED victory in the October 1946 elections, Honecker took his place amongst the SED leadership in the first postwar East German parliament, the German People's Congress (Deutscher Volkskongress). The German Democratic Republic was proclaimed on 7 October 1949 with the adoption of a new constitution, establishing a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union. Honecker was a candidate member for the secretariat of the Central Committee in 1950; by 1958, he had become a full member of the Politbüro.


In 1961, Honecker, as the Central Committee secretary for security matters, was in charge of the building of the Berlin Wall. In 1971, he initiated a political power struggle that led, with Soviet support, to himself becoming the new leader, replacing Walter Ulbricht as First Secretary of the SED Central Committee and as chairman of the National Defense Council. In 1976, he also became Chairman of the Council of State (Vorsitzender des Staatsrats der DDR) and thus the head of state.

Under Honecker's leadership, the GDR adopted a program of "consumer socialism," which resulted in a marked improvement in living standards—already the highest among the Eastern bloc countries. More attention was placed on the availability of consumer goods, and the construction of new housing was accelerated, with Honecker promising to "settle the housing problem as an issue of social relevance." Yet, despite improved living conditions, internal dissent was not tolerated. Around 125 East German citizens were killed during this period while trying to cross the border into West Berlin.

In foreign relations, Honecker renounced the objective of a unified Germany and adopted the "defensive" position of ideological Abgrenzung (demarcation). He combined loyalty to the USSR with flexibility toward détente, especially in relation to rapprochement with West Germany. In September 1987, he became the first East German head of state to visit West Germany. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/


In the late 1980s Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika, reforms to liberalize communism. Honecker and the East German government, however, refused to implement similar reforms in the GDR, with Honecker reportedly telling Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika, we have nothing to restructure." However, as the reform movement spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, mass demonstrations against the East German government erupted, most prominently the 1989 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. Faced with civil unrest, Honecker's Politbüro comrades colluded to replace him. The elderly and ill Honecker was forced to resign on 18 October 1989, and was replaced by Egon Krenz.


After the GDR was dissolved in October 1990, the Honeckers stayed with the family of the Lutheran pastor Uwe Holmer. Honecker then stayed in a Soviet military hospital near Berlin before later fleeing with Margot Honecker to Moscow, to avoid prosecution over charges of Cold War crimes. He was accused by the German government of involvement in the deaths of 192 East Germans who tried to leave the GDR. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Honecker took refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, but was extradited by the Yeltsin administration to Germany in 1992. However, when the trial formally opened in early 1993, Honecker was released due to ill health and on 13 January of that year moved to Chile to live with his daughter Sonja, her Chilean husband Leo Yáñez, and their son Roberto. He died in exile of liver cancer in Santiago on 29 May 1994. His body was cremated and the remains are believed to be in the possession of his widow Margot.


Honecker married Edith Baumann in 1950 and divorced her in 1953. They had a daughter, Erika (b. 1950). In 1953 he married Margot Feist and they remained married until his death. They had a daughter, Sonja, born in 1952. Margot Honecker served for several years as the GDR Minister for People's Education.

Famous quotes

* "The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed." (Berlin, 19 January 1989)

(Original: "Die Mauer wird in 50 und auch in 100 Jahren noch bestehen bleiben, wenn die dazu vorhandenen Gründe noch nicht beseitigt sind")

* "Neither an ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism."

(Original: "Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf, halten weder Ochs' noch Esel auf", Berlin, 7 October 1989)

* "The future belongs to socialism" (Original: Die Zukunft gehört dem Sozialismus) (early 1980's)
Honecker's autobiography Aus meinem Leben is translated into English as From my life. New York : Pergamon, 1981. ISBN 0080245323 http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/









Andrei Gromyko was born into a peasant family in the Belarusian village of Starye Gromyki, near Gomel. He studied agriculture at the Minsk School of Agricultural Technology and graduated in 1936. Later he worked as an economist at the Institute of Economics in Moscow.

Gromyko entered the department of the foreign affairs in 1939 after Joseph Stalin's purges in the section responsible for the Americas. He was soon sent to the United States and worked in the Soviet embassy there until 1943, when he was appointed the Soviet ambassador to the United States. He played an important role in coordinating the wartime alliance between the two nations and was prominent at events such as the Yalta Conference. He became known as an expert negotiator. In the West, Mr. Gromyko received a nickname "Mr. Nyet" (Mr. No) or "Comrade Nyet" or "Grim Grom" for his obstinate negotiating style. He was removed from his Washington post on April 10, 1946 in order to be able to devote his full attention to UN matters.
Andrei Gromyko signing the Charter of the United Nations, 26 June 1945


In 1946 he became the Soviet Union's representative on the United Nations Security Council. He served briefly as the ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1952-1953 and then returned to the Soviet Union, where he served as foreign minister for 28 years. As Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko played a direct role in the Cuban Missile Crisis and met with U.S. President Kennedy during the crisis. Gromyko also helped negotiate arms limitations treaties, specifically the ABM Treaty, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, SALT I and II, and the INF and START agreements. During the Brezhnev years, he helped construct the policy of détente between the superpowers and was active in drawing up the non-aggression pact with West Germany.
Sculpture of Andrei Gromyko in Gomel, Belarus


Gromyko always believed in the superpower status of the Soviet Union and always promoted an idea that no important international agreement could be reached without its involvement.

Gromyko was minister of foreign affairs from 1957 until 1985, when he was replaced as foreign minister by Eduard Shevardnadze. Gromyko entered the Politburo in 1973, eventually becoming chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (i.e. head of state of the Soviet Union) in 1985. However, the position was largely ceremonial, and he was forced out three years later because of his conservative views during the Gorbachev era. Gromyko died in Moscow a year later. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/



He had a wife named Ludmila (died 2004) and a son named Anatoli (born 1932).






Doctors and politicians in search of the magic bullet to solve the so-called medical malpractice crisis have focused on a pie-in-the-sky solution that won’t fly politically or constitutionally – the $250,000 cap on pain and suffering. That would take a constitutional amendment, which requires something close to a political consensus. That political consensus will never happen due to the determined and effective opposition of the trial lawyers and most consumer organizations, and the difficulties inherent in passing any constitutional amendment at the state or federal level. What’s worse, the public, even if half-informed, would reject the concept, of a cap on damages. It is obviously unfair and off the wall.

In the process of primary focus on a solution that will never happen these interest groups are missing the more obvious, the more practical and the more immediate solutions that may produce bigger and quicker premium reductions. To find these solutions all the doctors and politicians would have to do is to read a memo dated February 28, 2002, entitled “Suggestions to Effect Immediate Premium Savings for Health Care Providers.” The memo was written by John H. Reed, then the Director of the Cat Fund (now an attorney in private practice in Sellingsgrove, Pennsylvania), and his Deputy Director, Robert W. Waeger.

Here are a few of their recommendations, which should be given immediate and serious consideration, but which have been ignored by doctors and politicians and legislators and by the insurance commissioner and the insurance industry (the latter two groups being in perpetual hibernation when it comes to new ideas or basic reforms of the present system).

LET STATE PROVIDE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE COVERAGE THROUGH CAT FUND. Now doctors have to go to commercial insurers for the first $500,000 of coverage (the excess over that $500,000 primary limit is now provided by the CAT Fund).

The commercial insurance companies don’t want to write the business. Fine. They should have no complaints when the state of Pennsylvania fills the vacuum. As the memo in question indicates, the Cat Fund could provide the first $500,000 coverage for 40 percent less than the commercial insurance industry. That would be possible, as the state through the Cat Fund, would have a lower expense ratio. They would not have to pay commissions to agents or support a major marketing structure. The Cat Fund would not have to earn and pay a profit to shareholders. It would not have to pay taxes. It would not have to support the corporate structure that goes with any commercial insurance operation. The CAT Fund pays out in claims 99 cents on the dollar of collected premiums; commercial insurers, in contrast, pay out 60 to 65 cents on the dollar in claims, with 35 to 40 cents going for marketing, commissions, profits, etc. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/


CUT REQUIREMENT OF $500,000 IN PRIMARY COVERAGE TO $200,000. Now each doctor must buy $500,000 in commercial insurance and the rest if sold by the state-operated CAT fund. If this $500,000 requirement were cut to $200,000, the Reed-Waeger Memo estimates premiums would be reduced by at least 25 to 35 percent. This would also increase the market for malpractice as commercial insurers would have to shoulder less risk, and that in turn would improve the competitive environment. It would also make it easier for doctors to use self-insurance, risk retention groups (RRGs), fronted captives and other alternatives to commercial insurance (see next reform on RRGs). This change could come about without adoption of the first recommended change.

PROMOTE USE OF RRGs. The Risk Retention Group is a self-insurance device, which involves doctors banding together in non-profit groups to self-insure their coverage. It is a min-insurance company. The reduction of the primary requirement from $500,000 to $200,000, as suggested above, would make this approach easier to undertake. Although not mentioned in the MEMO, Reed recommends that a solvency fund be created to cover RRGs for medical malpractice. This was a recommendation he did make in testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on February 10, 2003. Now RRGs are not so covered, and this means that doctors would have a dangerous exposure if the RRG would go under. With commercial insurance companies, there is a solvency fund back-up and if this were extended to RRGs, they would become more popular and could make a larger contribution to the solution of any problems in obtaining reasonably priced medical malpractice insurance. The MEMO estimates that some specialists could cut their premiums by 60 to70 percent with RRGs.

COMPRESS RATE SCHEDULE. Now there is incredible variation in premiums between so-called high-risk specialists and lower-risk categories of doctors. Premiums are so tailored to each category of doctors that the insurance function of spreading risk does not work as effectively as it might. Compressing rate schedules means that the differences between the highest and lowest risk categories would be reduced, thus lowering the burden on the higher risk specialties and spreading risk more evenly. The Memo says, if the lowest risk groups paid $1,000 more, the higher risks groups could be cut by up to l/3rd.

CONCLUSION. The MEMO has a good summary of what these recommended changes might do: “What now seems to be a looming crisis can be averted. All of the above options … will immediately reduce malpractice premiums to health care providers. Most importantly, they can accomplish that result without taking money from taxpayers, without triggering the additional expense of borrowing, without burdening future generations of health care providers, and without having to bar the door of the courthouse to those individuals having legitimate claims.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx






When it comes to trade, chimps are far from venture capitalists. Our closest relatives almost always prefer a sure bet, according to a recent study, choosing value in hand over risk for higher returns. The finding brings us closer to understanding chimps’ trading habits and gives us precious insight into how trade, an essential cooperative behavior, works for humans.

To conduct the study, researchers started with two groups of chimps: one with little exposure to social and cognitive testing and no trading experience, and one with extensive bartering practice and language training. The scientists determined which food each chimp liked best. Then they assigned values to the foods. Finally, they taught the inexperienced chimps how to trade with tokens and food.

The results? When chimps possessing items of medium-high value, such as carrots, were offered high-value items, like grapes, they kept the lesser food. This tendency held true for both groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University, the lead researcher in this study.

The chimps’ risk-averse behavior, Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan says. Because humans can specialize, she adds, we can generate surplus to purchase or barter for better foods from one another.

















There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx


Here are a few questions about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

Q. I have moved from a PC to the iMac. In the Windows environment, I felt a need to run utilities to clean out the registry and defragment the hard disk frequently. Is this also needed on the iMac? If so, what programs are recommended?

A. The Mac operating system, called OS X Leopard, doesn't include a registry, which is a feature of Windows that holds information that programs need to operate properly. So there's no need to clean or maintain any registry on a Mac.

Mac hard disks, like those on Windows computers, can get fragmented -- a condition in which parts of files are so scattered around on the disk that the disk runs slowly. However, the operating system has some under-the-covers features that generally obviate the need to run a defragmentation utility. In fact, Apple, which calls defragmenting a disk "optimizing" it, flatly claims that "You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X." There are some Mac defragmentation utilities, but I don't believe you will need them unless you have large numbers of extremely large files and almost no free disk space.

Q. My son's computer frequently gets infected with adware, pop-ups. Recently it was hit with a continuing pop-up ad called VirusHeat that touted itself as a solution to the computer's problems. When I paid for VirusHeat, the problems went away. Is it legitimate?

A. According to numerous reports on the Web, including some from security companies, VirusHeat is a form of malicious or misleading software. It falls into a category that attempts to scare people into thinking their computers are badly infected, or exaggerates any problems you may have. This is a common tactic now used by creators of malware.

Some of these fake or misleading "security programs" may be designed merely to make you pay. Others may even be designed to install the very kinds of viruses, spyware or adware that they claim to fight. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/


Q. I have updated to a new PC. My data are on a floppy disc. There is no floppy disc drive on this new computer. How can I transfer my data?

A. For around $25, you can buy an external floppy disk drive that plugs into a new PC using its standard USB port. If you do so, and connect it to the new PC, you should be able to copy your data to the new computer's hard disk.


Ohio AG Marc Dann has resigned amid the scandal of a sexual harassment investigation in his office and his extramarital affair. Dann, 46, led the state on a 10-day odyssey, at first refusing to resign despite demands by Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and others within his party, a growing number of investigations into conduct at his office, and the filing Tuesday of articles of impeachment against him. (Find past LB coverage of the Dann scandal here and here.)

Two Fridays ago, Dann admitted to a “romantic relationship” with a member of his staff, prompting Democratic leaders such as Governor Ted Strickland to call for his Dann’s head. But despite a letter that Strickland and others sent to Dann, arguing that he’d lost “even the most remote hope” of continuing to serve effectively as AG, Dann told his staff that he was optimistic about plans to stay in office despite an impeachment threat. “I think that there is a great chance that we can continue to do great work for the people of the state.”

The great work that Dann, who was elected to his first term in 2006, referred to may have been his crusade against ratings agencies and his pursuit of mortgage lenders and brokers for allegedly inflating home prices and contributing to the subprime crisis. Click here for a past WSJ profile of Dann, titled “The Mortgage Cop.”

But yesterday, when Ohio democrats sprung into action, filing articles of impeachment against Dann, he appeared to lose his mettle. What followed was 24 hours of speculation that Dann would resign.


How would you like to carry around your entire DVD collection on a single disk? That is the promise of a new holo–graphic digital storage technology being developed by General Electric and coming to a computer near you around 2012. Although not the first commercial holographic storage system—that honor goes to InPhase Technologies’ Tapestry™ 300r holographic drive—GE’s system could be the first one aimed at consumers. (InPhase’s holographic drives, which debuted last year, sell for $18,000 and target broadcasters who need to archive television programs.)

Holographic media can store huge amounts of data because information is encoded in layers throughout the entire disk, not just on a single reflective surface as in today’s optical media. In GE’s system, a single CD-size disk made of plastic will be able to store about 1 terabyte of data, equivalent to 110 typical movie DVDs. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
This kind of capacity would make it possible to back up all your music, photos, home movies, and e-mails in one place; it would also allow for totally new, extremely data-intensive applications, such as Micro–soft’s MyLifeBits project, which aims to capture in digital form every–thing that happens in an individual’s life. Besides automatically archiving and indexing things like e-mails and text documents, the project includes a wearable camera that snaps a picture at least once every 30 seconds, creating a visual index of every day. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.