Confessions Of A Man Who Was Almost A Mass Murderer

"When a gunman killed 13 in Binghamton, N.Y., last week, reactions ranged from sorrow to fear, anger, and—self-recognition? Mansfield Frazier explains the time, 40 years ago, when he nearly went postal.

Each of the recent mass murders—14 dead in Binghamton, N.Y.; 10 in Samson, Ala.; four police officers dead in Oakland, Calif.; six left dead in an apparent murder-suicide in Santa Clara, Calif.; and eight dead in a North Carolina nursing home—brings memories of my own period of madness flooding back to me. Over 40 years ago, I quite literally came within one day of becoming a mass murderer. Fate, fortuitously, intervened to avert the tragedy, and I am forever, eternally, grateful.

Can my telling of my tale prevent maybe at least one future tragedy? While I would like to think so, I’m just not sure. However, I am sure that the spate of recent shootings are symptomatic of a deeper malaise in America, and, tragically, I suspect there are going to be many more mass shootings to come. After all, we’re a nation that loves—nay, idolizes—guns. More than one model of handgun has been named 'The Equalizer.'

And equalization—of power—is, I think, is what drives many individuals to 'go postal.' For quite some time, I’ve been totally amazed that more people don’t go off the deep end every day and start spraying gunfire in crowded places, particularly workplaces..."

*Photos via DailyMail

New Cosmic Map Reveals Colossal Structures

"Enormous cosmic voids and giant concentrations of matter have been observed in a new galaxy survey, one of the biggest completed so far. One of the voids is so large that it is difficult to explain where it came from.

Called the Six Degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS), the project scanned 41% of the sky, measuring positions and distances for 110,000 galaxies within 2 billion light years of Earth.

No previous survey has covered as much of the sky at such a distance. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which is based in the northern hemisphere, has probed about twice as far but covers only 23% of the sky....

...Scientists are still analysing the new map, but a few features stand out immediately. The biggest concentration of matter seen by the survey is a previously known giant pileup of galaxies called the Shapley supercluster, which lies about 600 million light years from Earth.

The survey also found some enormous voids – regions of space that are relatively empty, including one that is about 3.5 billion light years across....

...In fact the newly found void is so large that it is difficult to fit into our present understanding of the universe on the largest scales. Computer simulations show that gravity causes galaxies and galaxy clusters to get closer together over time, with voids growing between the clusters.

But the finite time available since the big bang makes it difficult to explain a void as large as the one found in this survey (other researchers, however, say galaxy maps already hint at the existence of such large-scale structures)...."

Robot Scientist Makes Discoveries Without Human Help

"A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.

Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast...

...Adam, which actually consists of a small roomful of lab equipment, has four personal computers that act as a brain, and possesses robot arms, cameras, liquid handlers, incubators and other equipment. The team gave the robot a freezer containing a library of thousands of mutant strains of yeast with individual genes deleted. It was also equipped with a database containing information about yeast genes, enzymes, and metabolism, and a supply of hundreds of metabolites...."

Crop Circle Depicts Pi

"A new crop circle in England depicts pi, an essential math formulation, accurately to ten decimal places in a huge crop circle near Barbury Castle, an Iron Age fort.

The crop circle depicts pi mystery was solved by astrophysicist Mike Reed who said it “clearly shows a coded image representing the first ten digits of Pi - the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter...”

Mind Control

Also, an interesting article plus photos on various parasites that control the minds of insects and mammals.

A Prosthesis For Speech

"For more than eight years, Erik Ramsey has been trapped in his own body. At 16, Ramsey suffered a brain-stem injury after a car crash, leaving him with a condition known as 'locked-in' syndrome. Unlike other forms of paralysis, locked-in patients can still feel sensation, but they cannot move on their own, and they are unable to control the complex vocal muscles required to speak. In Ramsey's case, his eyes are his only means of communication: skyward for yes, downward for no.

Now researchers at Boston University are developing brain-reading computer software that in essence translates thoughts into speech. Combined with a speech synthesizer, such brain-machine interfacing technology has enabled Ramsey to vocalize vowels in real time--a huge step toward recovering full speech for Ramsey and other patients with paralyzing speech disorders. The researchers are presenting their work at the annual Acoustical Society of America meeting in Paris this week..."

Adding And Subtracting

"Ryan and Dave are the most unique identical twins you'll ever meet. After tiring of piercing, tattoos, and implants about three years ago, they began exploring much heavier surgical modifications.

Dave had spent two and a half years in pre-med at Queens University in Kingston, and using contacts made both there and online he and his twin brother have changed themselves in ways far beyond anything anyone else has ever attempted."

Read an Interview with Ryan and Dave on BMEZINE.

The Blind Climber Who Sees With His Tongue

"...Born with retinoschisis, a rare disease akin to macular degeneration, Erik Weihenmayer was sightless by age 13. Even so, he continued to pursue his dream of mountaineering, and he succeeded.

In 2001 he became the first—and to date the only—blind climber to summit Mount Everest. Today he is climbing with the aid of a tool that allows him to “see” in a new way—with his tongue..."

Last Year I Killed A Man

"At 9.45am on Saturday, June 23 2007, I killed a man. A perfectly ordinary man, on a perfectly ordinary summer's day. CCTV pictures show him entering the station, unremarkable among all the passengers going to the West End. He waited at the front of the platform until he could hear my train approaching, then he calmly stepped down on to the tracks and looked directly at me as he waited for the impact.

The impact was only a matter of seconds in coming, but those seconds felt like minutes. This wasn't how it was meant to be. It wasn't how I had imagined it during my years as a Central line train driver. We talk of "jumpers"; workmates tell of blurry images flashing in front of them, of the shock of the impact. I wasn't expecting to see a young man in jeans and a summer shirt waiting for death, looking me in the eye."

*Photo Source

A Hundred Possessions

"Stuff starts to overwhelm you, says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family's belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can't refer to 100 things in the plural.)

In a country where clutter has given rise not only to professional organizers but also to professional organizers with their own reality series (TLC's Clean Sweep), Bruno's online musings about his slow and steady purge have developed something of a cult following online, inspiring others to launch their own countdown to clutter-free living..."

There is also a news article about, Michael Landy, a man who destroyed his possessions for art.