Friday, this that and the other thing.

3d Printed therapeutic replacement tissue

I had the strangest feeling yesterday. Wonder if it has ever happened to the rest of you. I was stopped at a light in Escondido with my foot firmly placed on the brake. Suddenly I had the sensation that I was rolling. What actually occurred was that the car in front of me moved forward imperceptibly. My brain intuited that I was the one that was actually moving. I got a sinking feeling at the top of my solar plexus as I nervously pushed harder on the brake pedal to stop the car from rolling forward. In a second I had a reality check, rerouted my gyro scope and continued forward on my way.

I had a similar experience about five years ago. Once again I lost my bearings in Escondido, on Tulip. I thought that I was moving forward into the back of a dump truck, the reality was that he backed in to me. Odd how it works. Me and my strange depth perception. He ended up paying us three grand for taking out the front of the old van.

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I have also experienced another unfortunate occurrence the last couple months, my Verizon wireless bill! For the last ten years I have had bills that run a couple hundred dollars a month for our various cell phones, mifi unit, ipad and the like. Very consistent. The last couple months they have doubled. I did some checking, my average last year was 4.8gb of data, I am topping 15gb these last three months.

Now my usage pattern has not changed at all. I am not streaming video or the like. I called Verizon last month and they said that that is what happens when you change computers, people tend to do a lot of software updating but this exponential increase was just too much.

The tech thought that perhaps it was a result of changing from the Snow Leopard to the Mountain Lion operating system on my new Mac Book Pro but that didn't seem plausible.

I called again the other day and think I have narrowed down the culprit. Not absolutely sure but I believe I  have it figured out. I live in a remote area with poor signal. I think that the excessive data use is a result of joining the icloud. The constant synching is like letting a data spigot in the always on position. So if you are in a remote location be very careful about hooking up to the cloud. I have now turned it off.

Unless of course it is something else.

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A few things to ponder. We know of digital coding as basically a binary operation, zero's and one but what happens if you go quantum? Check out this link, How the Alphabet of Data Processing Is Growing: Flying 'Qubits' Generated.

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My friend Rodrigo Bijou has co written this article with Evan Kohlmann in the Harvard Law Review, Planning Responses and Defining Attacks in Cyberspace.

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No such thing as global warming? Mojitos anybody? 1600 years worth of Andean ice has melted in the last twenty five years.

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Another thing that seems to be disappearing, freedom of speech. Environmental activist Daniel McGowan imprisoned for writing a blog post in the Huffington Post that was critical of the government.

In a statement Thursday, McGowan's lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "If this is indeed a case of retaliation for writing an article about the BOP retaliating against his free speech while he was in prison, it is more than ironic, it is an outrage."

Here is the apparently offending paragraph. Watch what you say or Obama and Holder are going to lock you up.

In a blog post for The Huffington Post, he criticizes the program for segregating prisoners based on their beliefs:
   

"It became quickly obvious to me that many CMU prisoners were there because of their religion or in retaliation for their speech. By my count, around two-thirds of the men are  Muslim, many of whom have been caught up in the so-called  "war on terror," others who just spoke out for their rights or allegedly took leadership positions in the  Muslim community at other facilities. Some, like me, were prisoners who have political views and perspectives that are not shared by the Department of Justice."

Three days after McGowan wrote the preceding paragraph, he was rearrested. "He just posted his thing a few days ago about all this stuff -- about his political beliefs and speech -- and they do something to him because of his post about this. It's crazy," Syan said. 

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Hate to talk about income inequality again, people get so, well you know... Randy Walters sends this along from Boing Boing.

Here's a rather graphic representation of the growth in income inequality in the USA since the 1960s; plotted on a chart where the income growth of the bottom 90 percent is represented by an inch-high bar; the growth of the top 10 percent needs a 163 foot-tall bar; while the top 0.01% need a 4.9 mile-high bar to represent their real wealth growth in the same period.

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Marco Rubio has been playing a very stupid, transparent game on immigration reform. The senator from Florida is one of the most detestable members of congress. Irrespective of how you feel about the topic ( I happen to believe that nobody should be rewarded citizenship for entering the country illegally) Rubio seems to only have one thing in mind, his own political fortune.

He released this letter to his colleagues today:

"Like all legislation of this magnitude, it should be reviewed and scrutinized thoroughly by numerous interested parties well before the first vote is taken," he wrote. He added that "defend the right rights of every senator, myself included, to conduct this process in an open and detailed manner" if senate leaders tried to interfere with the amendment process.  

I think that Rubio hates an idea if it is anybody else's idea, irrespective of the merit of the idea in question and he only really cares that he is seen as the white knight astride the immigration horse. Pure political calculus, slow play the hand until the pot gets bigger. Republicans love this guy because he is one of the rare Republican hispanics, I wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the country hated him, including the non cuban hispanics. Because he is such a phony baloney.