FROMHEREONIN.com :: BLOG

Have you ever seen something that you just had to take a picture of but never did because of what ever reason? I can tell you that this has happened to me too many times. What is stupid is that most of the time I end up talking myself out of taking the picture. “You are going to look stupid getting that picture.” or “Everyone is watching.” or “Why would you waste your time.” or the best one is… “I’ll get it next time.”
…Next time? When will that be? I’ll tell you that sometimes ‘next time’ never comes, so my advise is to “get it while you can.” Here is a perfect example.
I was out on the beach with my family and I continued to look over at the enormous tree leaning over the water thinking that I should photograph it. The lighting condition wasn’t the best and there was a family sitting near the location I would be photographing from. I began to explain to myself that the family doesn’t want some guy interfering with their time of relaxation. Maybe I’ll get it next time. Time went on and I still found myself drawn to that tree until I remembered what my photography teacher told me. “Whenever you see something that you just have to photograph, whether it be a work of art or just a snapshot… take the time and get the shot. There might not be a next time.”
With that in mind I wandered over next to the family and began composing the scene I wanted to shoot and ‘zing pop shabango!’ My shot was complete.
“OK, so now you got your shot… what?”
Well the next time I went back to that beach to see the tree relaxing over the ocean, the tree had died. It was no longer as grand as I saw it when I was inspired. Now it just lays waste over the rocks. In this case, and in most cases, there is no next time… Get it while you can.

“I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing… it’s been too long.” I told my wife.
So there I was in the midst of a beautiful sunset and I didn’t know how to handle it. It has been two years since I last went to shoot the landscape and now I have almost forgotten how to address the technical situations of shooting the sunset against a dark foreground. I had several attempts, but they turned out unsuccessful, so instead of accepting defeat, I decided to turn to a different subject.
In hopes of seeing the moon rise, and potentially capturing it, I put my back to the sunset. Previously I tried to photograph this hill with the hiking trail imbedded on it with no success. This time appeared to be the same. I was beginning to feel another defeated moment with the mundane compositions I was achieving when I noticed the two warning signs.
Leaning because of the wind and illuminated by the sunset I grabbed a nice foreground focus to offset the darkness of the background. I especially like the way the posts gradually disappear into the dark and together make another diagonal line to help draw the eyes around the image. I got a nice shot, at least I think I did.

With my success… I think I will go to the lava flow next weekend.

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man,” said Albert Einstein.

I didn’t even know that Albert Einstein had any involvement in the bees way of life until I went to see ‘The Happening’. Alarmingly enough there is something to this bee thing. Just this morning my family and I went to the beach and while my youngest was playing in the sand she got stung by a dead bee. When I notified my wife she mentioned that my oldest got stung by a dead bee yesterday on a different beach and that there were handfuls of dead bees everywhere along the beach. I didn’t really know what to make of this. First my main concern was that my daughter was alright, but then it got me thinking.

What could be causing this? 

I am only going to speculate… our desire to manipulate the natural process of this world is leading us to disaster. We need to stop.

“According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have altered the surface of the bee’s intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry — or perhaps it was the other way around. We don’t know.”

Kaatz was desperate to continue his studies but funding was cut off.

It doesn’t surprise me that funding was cut off because of the enormity of the agriculture business, especially with regard to the GMO seeds. You can’t interfere with a billionaire’s wallet. How will we ever get to the bottom of anything when industry gets in the way and our politician won’t stand for our best interests? 

 

How many times have you tried to make money online and started by searching the internet for some easy online money making miracle? I couldn’t even say. It seems that the way to actually make money is to have a website, subscribe to some pay per click agency, and then write a bunch of popular self help articles on the web. I found at least six websites that basically plagiarized someone’s article on how to make money during my searches. Really the article just summerized what I just laid out in three steps…

1. Have a website

2. Subscribe to a pay per click web service

3. Write a bunch of self help articles

What will happen is with a spider program the search engines, like Google, will browse and collect data from your website and categorizes it on their servers routinely. So when someone searches the web for something your website has, it will cue up on their servers and spit your site out amongst other websites in some crazy order. The older your site, the more keywords and articles, the more likely your site will arrive on top.  This means more potential clicks to your site, more potential clicks on ads, which means more money.

This whole process seems so superficial. I can see the internet being just a blob of useless information geared to making easy money.

I guess I should note that I did a little test a while ago with this technique. My blog was initially geared toward photography tips and techniques, however, my website traffic was nearly non-existent. So I searched for tips on generating traffic to my site in hopes of offsetting my expenses by using Google AdSense. What I found was what I summarized above and so I wrote some articles of concern and used some articles I found interesting. Then I waited. What I found was that my stats didn’t budge for the first month, however, after two and three months I began to see traffic from search terms of the new articles. Don’t get me wrong, the traffic isn’t substantial, however, there is more traffic.

In conclusion… it works, but it takes time and there isn’t some get rich quick program. 

chris

First off… did you know that the word vaccination came from the latin ‘vacca’ meaning cow because of the early use of the cowpox virus in the vaccine?  I didn’t know that.

I had been doing some research into vaccines mainly because I have two young daughters and the scare about some vaccines causing autism makes me concerned. I only want what is best for them.  Anyway, I navigated my way through sites for and against vaccines when I stumbled across a chart showing the morbidity rate of preventable diseases (below).  This chart focused on comparing the annual morbidity rate of the 20th century and current date… meaning 2006. I have to tell you that usually I would pay little attention to the details, but right when I was about to scroll past I noticed the smallpox stat.  Huh? Smallpox was eradicated a while back, why would it be on a chart proving vaccinations to be a necessity. Just to make sure I did a little search about smallpox and verified that the last case of smallpox was in 1979.  Since then… nothing.  So what then is the relevance of this chart?  

This statistic means nothing to me.  Of course the numbers seem overwhelming when compared together.  First you have a century where the disease started out running rampant, claiming millions of lives, contrasted with a year, almost 30 years, after the disease had been eradicated. Nonsense.  That would be like comparing the annual deaths of the Dodo bird of 2006 with the annual deaths of the Dodo bird of the 17th century.  I bet the numbers would be huge.  Just for fun we’ll say that the Dodo birds were given a vaccination which gave them immunity against the effects of man in the late 17th century which is why we see… ready… no more Dodo bird deaths. SUCCESS! Patent, where do I sign?

I know I am being far fetched and ridiculous, however, the CDC making the claim that vaccinations are working far after the disease is eradicated is nonsense.  Not to mention that there was more at work in containing smallpox than just the vaccine itself; like sanitation and isolation.  

 

Somethings just leave me with an uneasy feeling. Can’t we just leave science fiction alone? Is Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ closer than we think? And finally… WHY?

Below news article taken from The Scotsman

Exclusive: Half man, half chimp - should we beware the apeman’s coming?

Published Date: 29 April 2008
By JENNY HAWTHORNE

A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of “humanzee,” created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.
In an interview with The Scotsman, Dr Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, warned the controversial draft Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill did not prevent human sperm being inseminated into animals.

He said if a female chimpanzee was inseminated with human sperm the two species would be closely enough related that a hybrid could be born.

He said scientists could possibly try to develop the new species to fill the demand for organ donors.

Leading scientists say there is no reason why the two species could not breed, although they question why anyone would want to try such a technique.

Other hybrid species already created include crossed tigers and lions and sheep and goats.

Dr MacKellar said he feared the consequences if scientists made a concerted effort to cross humans with chimpanzees. He said: “Nobody knows what they would get if they tried hard enough. The insemination of animals with human sperm should be prohibited.

“The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill prohibits the placement of animal sperm into a woman The reverse is not prohibited. It’s not even mentioned. This should not be the case.”

He said if the process was not banned, scientists would be “very likely” to try it, and it would be likely humans and chimps could successfully reproduce.

“If you put human sperm into a frog it would probably create an embryo, but it probably wouldn’t go very far,” he said.

“But if you do it with a non-human primate it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it could be born alive.”

Dr MacKellar said the resulting creature could raise ethical dilemmas, such as whether it would be treated as human or animal, and what rights it would have.

“If it was never able to be self-aware or self-conscious it would probably be considered an animal,” he said. “However, if there was a possibility of humanzees developing a conscience, you have a far more difficult dilemma on your hands.”

He said fascination would be enough of a motive for scientists to try crossing the two species.

But he also said there was a small chance of scientists using the method to “humanise” organs for transplant into humans. “There’s a desperate need for organs. One of the solutions that has been looked at is using animal organs, but because there’s a very serious risk of rejection using animal organs in humans they are already trying to humanise these organs.

“If they could create these humanzees who are substantially human but are not considered as humans in law , we could have a large provision of organs.”

He wrote to the Department of Health to ask that the gap in the draft legislation be addressed.

The department confirmed that the bill “does not cover the artificial insemination of an animal with human sperm”.

It said: “Owing to the significant differences between human and animal genomes, they are incompatible and the development of a foetus or progeny is impossible.

“Therefore such activity would have no rational scientific justification, as there would be no measurable outcome.”

Dr MacKellar disagrees. He said: “The chromosomal difference between a goat and a sheep is greater than between humans and chimpanzees.”

Professor Bob Millar, director of the Medical Research Council Human Reproductive Sciences Unit, based in Edinburgh, agreed viable offspring would be possible. He said: “Donkeys can mate with horses and create infertile offspring; maybe that could happen with chimpanzees.”

But he said he would oppose any such attempt. “It’s unnecessary and ridiculous and no serious scientist would consider such a thing. Ethically, it’s not appropriate.

“It’s also completely impractical. Chimps would never be a source of organs for humans because of the viruses they carry and the low numbers.”

Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was “troublesome”, he could see no ethical objections to the creation of humanzees.

“Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past,” he said.

“If it turns out in the future there was fertilisation between a human animal and a non-human animal, it’s an idea that is troublesome, but in terms of what particular ethical principle is breached it’s not clear to me.

“I share their squeamishness and unease, but I’m not sure that unease can be expressed in terms of an ethical principle.”

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “It’s just not a problem. If you inseminate an animal with human sperm, scientifically nothing happens. The species barriers are too great.”

HYBRIDS ARE AT CROSS PURPOSES

EVEN though hybrids of humans and animals have never been created, many other creatures have been crossed successfully.

Lions and tigers have been bred to create ligers, the world’s largest cats.

And there are also zorses (zebra and horse), wholphins (whale and dolphin), tigons (tiger and lion), lepjags (leopard and jaguar) and zonkeys (zebra and donkey).

As well as these hybrid mammals, there are also hybrid birds, fish, insects and plants.

Many hybrids, such as mules, are sterile, which prevents the movement of genes from one species to another, keeping both species distinct. However, some can reproduce and there are scientists who believe that grey wolves and coyotes mated thousands of years ago to create a new species, the red wolf.

More commonly, hybrids mate with one of their parent species, which can influence the genetic mix of what gets passed along to subsequent generations.

Hybrids can have desirable traits, often being fitter or larger than either parent.

Most hybrid animals have been bred in captivity, but there are examples of the process occurring in the wild.

This is far more common in plants than animals but in April 2006 a hunter in Canada’s North-west Territories shot a polar bear whose fur had an orange tint.

Research showed that it had a grizzly bear father, and it became known as a pizzly.

In 2003, DNA analysis confirmed that five odd-looking felines found in Maine and Minnesota were bobcat-lynx hybrids, dubbed blynxes.

Last Updated: 29 April 2008 8:08 AM
Source: The Scotsman
Location: Edinburgh

An interesting article in the SFGATE.

STIMULUS PLAN A SCAM TO BENEFIT THE RICH
Higher loan limits will lead to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac bailout
Sean Olender
Sunday, February 3, 2008

Congress is about to sell us the biggest fraud in American history.
It’s been highly touted as an economic stimulus bill that will help millions of Americans - and has the backing of both President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the coming year, individuals would receive rebates of up to $600 and families up to $1,200. There are other goodies, too, including tax write-offs for small businesses and an expansion of the child tax credit.
But, as the old adage goes, nothing comes for free. As part of the bill, Congress is set to rush through an increase in the mortgage loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and Federal Housing Administration insurance, too) - from $417,000 to $729,750 - the first step toward a massive financial disaster in which taxpayers will end up paying through the nose.
Here’s how we got to this point. Domestic and international investors hold hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debt, because U.S. investment houses sold them junk securities based on often fraudulent mortgages. Many of these mortgages were sold to unqualified buyers under terms that made widespread foreclosures a certainty once the housing market began to fall.
Investment banks and bond rating agencies sat down and tried to figure out how to describe Americans with insufficient incomes and little for a down payment as great credit risks on loans too big for their incomes. The new rules focused on credit scores, because it was a good excuse to avoid looking at income and down payment, factors that would have restricted this moneymaking fiasco.
Now, thanks to Congress, junk bond investors will be able to pawn off their bad debt to Fannie and Freddie, instead of suing the big investment houses for ripping them off. This shift will certainly doom Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so don’t be surprised if we, the taxpayers, have to bail out poor Fannie and Freddie - to the tune of more than $1 trillion.
Why more than $1 trillion? If Goldman Sachs is correct in its recent projections that home prices in California are going to drop 35 to 40 percent, the state’s losses alone would top $2 trillion, because California has a disproportionate number of jumbo loans. The irony here is that the collapse in housing prices could make Fannie insolvent even without raising the loan limit. Increasing Fannie’s limit is like going on a spending spree with your credit cards because you know you are going to file for bankruptcy in a few months. Only here the taxpayer is left holding the bag. Our children will pay interest on this debt in perpetuity. It is our debt. It is inescapable.
In the coming months, Fannie and Freddie will buy up mortgages based on old, fraudulent appraisals and on loans with bogus inflated incomes. Unfortunately, many of these loans will still default.
But that’s just the start. Brace yourself for another wave of faxes, phone calls and junk mail urging you to refinance at only 1 percent. With zero new regulation, the same bad actors that caused this crisis can once again inflate property appraisals and begin a new cycle of fraud.
There are firms that rent assets to people to help them fraudulently qualify for a mortgage - like loaning them money to keep in their bank account for a couple months so they can fool the lender with documented savings that evaporate the day after the mortgage is signed. Another popular ruse: The borrower pays an employer to pay him a lot of money in a fake job for a month or two so he can show a fat paycheck in his loan docs. Some real estate agents and mortgage brokers actually refer buyers to these services.
Contrary to popular myth, Fannie holds a lot of subprime debt, option ARM debt and other dodgy securities. Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed almost 45 percent of all mortgages in America last year. BusinessWeek noted in 2007 that Fannie and Freddie have “moved more prominently into low-documentation loans, which require little or no proof of the borrower’s income.” Expansion of Fannie and Freddie’s reckless lending is exactly what Congress wants because it’s plausibly deniable. Teary-eyed lawmakers can take to the airwaves a year from now and declare: “We had no idea Fannie could go under, but we can’t cut and run now. We have to bail out Fannie and Freddie for the good of America! It’s going to be a tough slog, but you’re getting used to those, no?”
Those same lawmakers won’t mention the fact that they get paid far more by real estate lobbyists than they do from our Treasury.
I’ve spoken with borrowers who stopped making mortgage payments seven or more months ago. None has received a default notice. Defaults may be much higher than banks are letting on. The data lags are growing suspiciously long. Nobody knows what’s going on. Seven months without making a single payment! Will Fannie guarantee those loans because they aren’t in formal default yet? Nobody wants to know, because if they know, they might be called to testify next year. That’s why lawmakers want to raise the limits now and ask questions later.
This shortsighted plan poses a terrible risk to every American taxpayer, especially retirees, because Social Security money will be needed to bail out Fannie and Freddie. And even if you live in high-priced San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York - and stand to benefit from the increased loan limit - this is a horrible fraud on you, too, because raising the limit to $730,000 risks a systemic crisis that will cost far more than any temporary rebate check.
In support of the economic stimulus bill, Bush will have to face “working American families” and explain that some of their tax money is going to be spent guaranteeing $730,000 mortgages on $1 million homes. It’s like some sort of upside-down communism where the poor pay the rich welfare. Why should taxes from families earning $48,000 a year be used to support expensive mortgages in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco? Welfare for the hungry and homeless is evil, but welfare for million-dollar homeowners facing a tough refi … well, that’s called “helping the economy.”
I can imagine the president’s radio address playing in the heartland: “We have some families with million-dollar homes on the coasts who are really hurting and so we need you, the working families of America, to stand together with them and help them avoid the kind of home price depreciation that might leave them without a new Lexus for years.”
I guess Congress’ hope is that median-income families will be too busy using their rebates to buy much-needed groceries to notice that the rich folk are getting way with a new scam.
Several months ago, economist Nouriel Roubini of New York University’s Stern School of Business suggested that the housing market has been effectively nationalized. At first it seemed crazy, but now it’s fairly obvious. In August alone, Fannie and Freddie increased their loan portfolios by $62 billion, and the Federal Home Loan Bank by $110 billion. That total of $172 billion would come to just over $2 trillion annually - not much less than the entire federal budget.
Everyone seeking a loan, securitizing a mortgage, and buying or selling a mortgage security will now be dealing, in one way or another, with the U.S. government. This type of intervention is very expensive and will eat everything in its path, including Social Security.
If we’re going to have a government-financed intervention, it should be to make sure that Social Security benefits go to those who paid for them, that the poor are fed and housed, or that the army of uninsured receive health benefits. If, as they say, we don’t have enough money for those important things, then I think we don’t have enough money to bail out banks and bond investors.
Don’t let me down, my fellow Americans. Let’s vote out anyone who dares to vote for this scam.
Sean Olender is an attorney in San Mateo. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Visible Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan, May 11, 1996

Seems like something we should all ponder before we begin tripping over one another.

Image Credit NASA JP:
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ‘Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.